Thursday, February 5, 2015

The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.

Some of the pernicious ideas that Postmodernism has given rise to are the following:
(1) the view that there is no such thing as objective truth;

(2) cultural relativism;

(3) following from (2) the view that there is no such thing as objective morality;

(4) the view that modern science is not true or just one “narrative” that is just as “valid” as any other, and

(5) the view that no text can have a fixed meaning intended by its author.
These ideas have led to intellectual catastrophe on the Left. They would be just as devastating to Post Keynesian economics, if seriously pursued as epistemological ideas. John King (2002: 195–196), for example, is absolutely right to point out that Postmodernist ideas are incompatible with core Post Keynesian principles, such as objective reality and objective truth, and even something as basic as Nicholas Kaldor’s “stylised facts” about modern capitalist economies.

But here I just want to take a quick look over the intellectual origins of modern Postmodernism.

The origins of Postmodernism are complicated. In the mid-20th century, structuralism was the fashionable theory which had replaced existentialism and which had spread from linguistics to anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.

But by the 1970s many French intellectuals, many of whom were former Marxists and communists, reacted against structuralism and Marxism and invented a new poststructuralist philosophy.

It is true that some of the big name philosophers who were associated with poststructuralism did not explicitly identify themselves as “postmodernists,” but we should not be fooled by this: the French Poststructuralist movement is a major source of modern Postmodernism.

Within French poststructuralism, there were at least two important strands, as follows:
(1) the strand derived from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and

(2) the one associated with the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984).
But numerous other influences flowed into the Postmodernism cacophony that you find in modern cultural studies, literature and philosophy departments in modern universities.

One stream that has entered into modern postmodernism is semiotics, which was in origin a discipline within structuralism but came to influence certain Poststructuralists like Lacan and Foucault.

A third, but underrated, influence on modern Postmodernism was Anglo-American New Criticism, which had been the dominant form of literary criticism in the English-speaking world until the late 1950s and early 1960s, but which, even though it has collapsed, also influenced the theory of textual “deconstruction” that has become an almost cult-like staple of modern postmodernism and cultural studies departments.

A fourth source of modern Postmodernist pretension is the pseudo-science of Freudian psychology and its bastard offspring Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lacanianism.

A fifth influence, though perhaps weaker than the ones above, was Theodor Adorno and the German Frankfurt School, whose social and cultural Marxism was a harbinger of many themes in modern Postmodernism.

Many people on the Left who think of themselves as intellectuals or who are (bizarrely) regarded widely as Leftist intellectuals have been brought up on a steady diet of Postmodernism nonsense: you can always spot them by their arcane and verbose jargon, and their frequent inability to explain what they mean in ordinary, straightforward language. The appalling cult of Postmodernist jargon was famously pilloried by the Postmodernism Generator, a computer program that can write a grammatically correct essay in the Postmodernist style, but is literally nonsense.

Postmodernism as a general philosophy, as the famous linguist Noam Chomsky has said, should go to the flames. It is as simple as that.

Maybe some few ideas can be salvaged from it, but I would be very surprised indeed if these were anything but trivial truths or things that other philosophers have already known for a long time.

Finally, here are some videos below on postmodernism. The first two are excellent videos in which Chomsky explains the history and absurdities of Postmodernism, and its terrible effects on attitudes to modern science and even intellectual life in the developing world.





The final one is from John Searle, from his own conversations with Foucault and Bourdieu, explaining why French poststructuralism is filled with such incomprehensible rubbish.



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aylesworth, Gary. 2005 (rev. 2015). “Postmodernism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

King, J. E. 2002. A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA.

30 comments:

  1. Wait, why do you view Freud's work as pseudo-science?

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    1. Well, I would take these as a quick starting point:

      http://skepdic.com/psychoan.html

      http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2468/was-sigmund-freud-a-quack

      http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html

      Then I would direct you to these works:

      MacMillan, Malcolm. 1991. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Elsevier North Holland. The Hague.

      Cioffi, Frank. 1998. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Open Court, Chicago.

      Crews, Frederick et al. 1995. The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York Review, New York.

      Crews, Frederick. 1996. "The Verdict on Freud," Psychological Science 7: 63-67.

      Frankly, there is an awful lot that can be said on this subject and in defence of the thesis that Freud's work and that of his immediate followers was pseudo-science.

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    2. An awful lot can be said that psychology in general is pseudoscience.

      Didn't the DSM classify homosexuality as mental illness until the late-1970s? I don't say this for rhetorical effect. It strongly suggests that the DSM criteria are tied to social norms at any given point in time.

      But then wasn't it Lacan that said that psychoanalysis could never aspire to be a science?

      Hmm... funny that...

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    3. None of this vindicates Postmodernism, or its absurd ideas, such as the non-existence of any objective truth.

      Indeed, if there is no such thing as objective truth, then nothing you say can be true.

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    4. LK, the problem is clearly that you want to kill your father and have sex with your mother, due to a bad experience with a mirror in early childhood.

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    5. But again: many of the author's you cite do believe in objective truth.

      You aren't familiar with this stuff. Don't write about it.

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    6. "many of the author's you cite do believe in objective truth."

      Give me the names of just 4 with chapter and verse citations of where in their writings they say they support objective truth.

      And note that I was talking about modern postmodernists generally not accepting objective truth, not the earlier thinkers who influenced them like the structuralists or Frankfurt school or New Criticism literary theorists.

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  2. Thank you! I've been saying this for years, but few in "polite" society will listen (or at least admit it). The Left requires a strong moral structure in order to justify its positions. Once you abandon everything to relativistic ideas like postmodernism you have nothing left but a power struggle, which the Right will always win.

    Of course, the problem is that so many important social movements, like the feminist and civil- and gay rights movements, tended to use postmodernist arguments to attack the social structures that needed to be fixed. But while they were morally right, we're now paying a huge price for the tactics they used.

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    1. Yes, Postmodernism is a rot and poison that has crippled Left intellectual life -- and I say that as a person who regards himself as being firmly on the Left.

      E.g., denying objective truth is utter self-refuting idiocy.

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    2. How much relation to Post-modernism and post-structuralism would you put post-positivism? It seems to me that post-positivism, like post-Keynesianism, recognizes the inherent inability of social sciences to achieve true objectivity, but that nonetheless we should strive to overcome the inherent biases and obstacles to decipher said objective reality.

      On the subject of morality, it pains me because I do not see morality as absolute or objective, but relative to the person, place, time period, social norms and mores - exploitation to Marx might as well have been the epitome of evil, while to Schumpeter a display of brilliant creation.

      But despite that technical truth of the non-absoluteness of morality, we as humans SHOULD act in a way that is moral and beneficial towards humanity. Utilitarianism and Humanism, for example, seem to be the principles and goals that the Left SHOULD strive for. Relativism used for political persuasion, I agree, tends to dissolve into power struggles without the same kind of moral backing that is counter-productive to the Left's political goals.

      But what branch of philosophy would justify this sort of line of thinking? Post-Humanism? Or perhaps the center-left ought to simply create a Post-Moralism sub-philosophy to answer these very questions.

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    3. I think the point of the post and videos is that all post-whatever are nothing but intellectual onanism—there is no one behind the curtain. So, these "movements" won't get you (or anyone) anywhere.

      To the extent there is an "objective reality", the scientific method is the best bet to get you there so far. But the scientific method has its own serious limits that are especially acute when trying to understand groups of humans and their activities. Pretending otherwise by using lots of $2 words won't help.

      As for morality, your position appears to be very much a relativist one that will always degenerate into an ends-justifies-the-means view. So, it would seem that you would have to be comfortable accepting the different views of a Jew and her Nazi guard at Auschwitz circa 1943 are each valid. In the end, morality simply becomes (or degenerates) into whatever the strong decides to impose on the weak. That seems pretty much what we have today.

      As to your last question, philosophy—without any "pre-", "post-" or any other modifier—used to address these questions along with theology. That was before modernism and the degeneration of philosophy into the realm of hermenutics. The real problem is that one has to accept answers, even if they limit your freedom action. And there are plenty of good answers that are thousands of years old.

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    4. Ultimately, in my view the ends justify the means - that is generally an idea attached onto utilitarianism (i.e. "greatest good for greatest number of people"). Seizing a local tribal leader's large storage of food to feed the tribe's starving would be viewed by many to be the moral action - you're saving lives at little expense, and to others as immoral - theft! you're stealing someone's property! To post-Keynesians, restricting the freedom of banks is worth it to prevent speculative bubbles, financial crises, or even Finance's ascendancy to political power (due to all the bad thing's usury can do) can be viewed as the "moral", "good", utilitarian, or even the GDP-maximizing course of action.

      It's not at all that I 'accept' the views of the Nazis - it's an abomination to my morality. And as a Humanist and Utilitarian, it's something that I would fight against and denounce as immoral, inhumane and (do I even need to say it?) counter-productive and against human prosperity.

      Yet, to Aliens observing human behavior and history from outer space, one group of humans murdering or genociding another group may as well be as amoral as a Lion eating his young, or a fire ant colony destroying a black ant colony.

      Which is why I would focus on the moral principles to best govern humanity and its interactions with each other. (And morality regarding animals - well that's a whole different can of worms).

      Problem is, I haven't yet read of a "pre-" or "post-" or any kind of moral philosophy that give me these kinds of answers.

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    5. The "ends justify the means" nonsense is just a caricature of consequentialist ethics. Rights and moral obligations matter.

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    6. Rights and moral obligations do matter, but what if one conflicts with the other? That's where cost-benefit analysis, pragmatism, utilitarianism, and if those are sometimes taken to the logical extreme (to the point of caricature), "ends justify the means" comes into play. Where do you draw the line between the balance of the two?

      "balance", "moderation" and "pragmatism" all deal moreso with power than objective morality, and yet to me, balancing the interests of the working class with the interests of entrepreneur, corporations, creative-intellengstia-artisan classes and state, and leads to a society where people can begin to maximize their moral and "good" interactions with one another.

      Anyhow, it's probably best to take a look at the various consequentialist and utilitarian philosophies out there. Then again, Mises was a form of a utilitarian, if you can believe that.

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  3. 'Postmodernism' is a category made up by its critics. Actually being familiar with many of the theories I can give a gloss on this as such... My commentary in CAPS.

    ______

    Some of the pernicious ideas that Postmodernism has given rise to are the following:

    (1) the view that there is no such thing as objective truth;

    THIS IDEA EXISTED LONG BEFORE POST-STRUCTURALIST PHILOSOPHY AND CAN BE TRACED BACK TO THE SOPHISTS OF ANCIENT GREECE. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN PRESENT.

    SOME POST-STRUCTURALISTS SUBSCRIBE TO THIS. SOME DON'T. LACAN DID NOT. NOR DID THE LATE DERRIDA (ON MY READING).

    (2) cultural relativism;

    SAME AS POINT (1).

    (3) following from (2) the view that there is no such thing as objective morality;

    FOUCAULT'S LAST THREE BOOKS WERE ON ETHICS (HISTORY OF SEXUALITY). LACAN GAVE A VERY FAMOUS SEMINAR ON ETHICS. AND LATE DERRIDA CONSTANTLY SPOKE/WROTE ON ETHICS.

    (4) the view that modern science is not true or just one “narrative” that is just as “valid” as any other, and

    THE ONLY KEY AUTHOR WHO DEALT WITH SCIENCE TO MY KNOWLEDGE WAS LACAN. I KNOW OF NOWHERE WHERE HE SAYS THAT SCIENCE IS UNTRUE ETC.

    MANY POST-STRUCTURALISTS, HOWEVER, ATTACKED 'SCIENTISM'. AS DO POST-KEYNESIANS.

    (5) the view that no text can have a fixed meaning intended by its author.

    THIS IS NOT THE CLAIM. THE CLAIM IS THAT AN AUTHOR ONLY EVER HAS A PARTIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR TEXT. READERS WILL THEN ONLY HAVE A PARTIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE AUTHOR'S UNDERSTANDING. AND SO ON. AND SO ON.
    _____

    'Postmodernism' is a concoction of its opponents. Rarely do these opponents actually understand any of the post-structuralist writers. Hence there are never any actual criticisms of the writers.

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    1. "THE ONLY KEY AUTHOR WHO DEALT WITH SCIENCE TO MY KNOWLEDGE WAS LACAN. I KNOW OF NOWHERE WHERE HE SAYS THAT SCIENCE IS UNTRUE ETC."

      Then clearly you weren't looking hard enough.

      See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, 1998. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. Picador, New York.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

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    2. "THIS IS NOT THE CLAIM. THE CLAIM IS THAT AN AUTHOR ONLY EVER HAS A PARTIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR TEXT. "

      Even if what you say is correct, this idea is also laughable.

      In general, if these ideas existed before Postmodernism, this hardly constitutes a defence of Postmodernism or the ideas in question.

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    3. Could I please have a direct quote from Lacan saying that science is untrue?

      And when you realise that you cannot find one and have never read one will you please step back and think about what you are doing here; i.e. making criticisms of material you are not familiar with.

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    4. First of all, I do not say above that Lacan said that science is untrue.

      What I said is that some Postmodernists say that

      "modern science is not true or just one “narrative” that is just as “valid” as any other"

      Frankly, you do not have to look far to see the evidence for this.

      This blogger cites actual papers where postmodernists do this:

      http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/postmodernist-attacks-on-science-based-medicine/

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    5. Phil, I'd suggest you reread your Lacan. Slowly and deliberately. And make lots of notes. You obviously didn't get him. (Yeah sure, Lacan subscribing to objective truth...*chuckle*)

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  4. While I'm not as interested in Philosophy as I once was at a younger age, I did poke around a bit at the so-called "Postmodern" movement. I got the impression that much of it was filled with bloated platitudes, and I also got the impression that the bloated platitudes drowned out whatever flashes of insight they could offer. That said, I feel that Postmodernism is massively overrated, and like any other intellectual movement, shouldn't be taken *TOO* seriously by any proper thinker - regardless of his or her politics.

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  5. I think the point of the post and videos is that all of the post-whatever "movements" are nothing by intellectual onanism. There is simply no one behind the curtain. So, you can't learn anything about reality this way; you need to use the scientific method, and live with its limitations when it comes to questions about human social interactions.

    As for morality, you seem to be a relativist. So, you must then be comfortable accepting the different view of a Jew and her Nazi guard at Auschwitz circa 1943. In short, "morality" is noting by what the stronger use to justify their abuse of the weaker. This is why the Democrats have merged with the Republicans to become nothing by shills for the < 1%, and Occupy can only make lots of noise but no real difference.

    Your desire to find an "answer" is laudable, but misguided. The answers have been known for millennia, discussed and honed by the great philosophers who came before Enlightenment. The real problem is that people want a philosophy that squares all circles and lets everyone off the hook—except the "bad guys". No, to have morals you have to make choices. And to make choices you have to have faith. And today faith is in short supply among intellectuals and academics.

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    1. "As for morality, you seem to be a relativist."

      I am no such thing. I reject ethical relativism.

      I think we can have a secular, objective ethics, and have sketched how we can here:

      http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2013/03/thoughts-on-version-of-consequentialist.html

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  6. The appalling cult of Chomskyian jargon was famously pilloried by the ChomskyBot, a computer program that can write a grammatically correct essay in the Chomsky style, but is literally nonsense.

    http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

    Funny how easy it is...

    I'd say that I could build a KantBot too.

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    1. The difference is that Chomsky's writing, and English, is not nonsense. He may make unconvincing arguments or false statements sometimes, but it is not unintelligible rubbish.

      So much of Postmodernist writing is.

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    2. And you don't think that perhaps 'unintelligible rubbish' is in the eye of the beholder? When I read many things I find them unintelligible. But that does not make them rubbish. I am only willing to call nonsense when I am confident that I understand them.

      This is just rhetoric, LK, backed by references from critics that buttress your own a priori views. Take a step back and look at what you're writing here. I would expect better from you.

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    3. "And you don't think that perhaps 'unintelligible rubbish' is in the eye of the beholder?"

      No. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is rubbish.

      A lot of postmodernist writing is like this.

      Just look at the Sokal Affair to see how these idiot Postmodernists couldn't recognise gibberish when they saw it:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

      Or for example this outstanding gibberish from Félix Guattari:

      "We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. "
      http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html

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  7. Maybe you can elaborate on your statement that their exists an objective truth and an objective reality. I believe so as well, but I doubt that it is possible to experience nor proof either of them. As Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, Chpt 6) writes: " Now 'events', relations' 'projections' 'possibilities' can be meaningfully objective only for a subject - not only in terms of observability and measurability, but in terms of the very structure of the event or relationship." Furthermore: "The project of cognition involves operations on objects, or abstractions from objects which occur in a given universe of discourse and action. Science observes, calculates and theorizes from a position in this universe. ... It is my purpose to demonstrate the internal instrumentalist character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a priori technology and the a priori of a specific technology - namely, technology as form of social control and domination."

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    1. Objective truth is defensible under the correspondence theory of truth, and can be seen easily in any simple analytic proposition:

      e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried".

      Here the necessary truth follows from definitions of word and consistent use of language. To deny this is to commit a fallacy of equivocation.

      As to objective reality, we can defend this with an argument for indirect realism. That we do not have absolute truth here is irrelevant: what we have is a synthetic a posteriori truth which can be defended, on the basis of evidence and inductive arguments, as very probably true and the best explanation we have.

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  8. Nieztsche has a quote (Gay Science 173) which fits Foucault and his ilk. Read 'leftist academics' where he says 'crowd': "Being profound and seeming profound.-- Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to appear profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something, it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water."

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