This question has been bugging me for a while. Postmodernism develop substantially out of a desire to rid French philosophy of both Marxist and conservative tropes and to demonstrate the banality of much power-based analysis. Somehow, it has metamorphosised into a philosophical doctrine that underpins contemporary identity politics (IDP). IDP makes everything about power, has very strong conceptions of moral truth, and while it doesn't make use of any meta-narratives it does make heavy use of their close cousin: massively reductionist theories of causation. How did postmodernism morph into the very thing it was intended to combat?
I'm a philosophy major, and while I mostly work in the areas of existentialism and welfare economics (an odd combination, for sure) I also did a lot of postmodernism when I was younger, and even a fair bit of epistemology because my primary mentor had been Karl Popper's PhD student and research assistant. I am very far from an expert on postmodernism (what a waste of time!) but I've read all the classics up to but not including Judith Butler (whose work to me seems to coincide with the Marxist intrusion into post-modernism theory in America).
As far as I can tell, there are three core ideas in postmodernism:
1. From Lyotard: "incredulity towards metanarratives"
2. From Foucault: Experts are biased and it is very difficult to remove this bias from empirical research practices. As such, experts should not be entirely trusted, especially in areas where it is hard to be an expert because the subject matter is heavily tied up with social constructs or not amenable to rigorous empirical methods e.g. psychotherapy and criminal justice. Who is deemed an expert is substantially a function of power and not just expertise.
3. From Derrida: deconstructionism. This is where it all turns to shit frankly. Derrida is a rambler trying to disguise poor ideas with arcane language, much like Zizek and Spivak.
This is the core of deconstructionism, from Wikipedia:
Derrida's approach consisted in conducting readings of texts with an ear to what runs counter to the intended meaning or structural unity of a particular text. The purpose of deconstruction is to expose that the object of language, and that which any text is founded upon, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible.
From Derrida comes all the tropes of insane postmodernism, namely that not only can objective truths not be empirically proven (something Popper basically says), but objective reality doesn't exist. There are only readings. All truth is socially constructed, and so all truth-claims are merely a manifestation of power. This gets particular retarded when married to the axiomatic assumption, common among campus Marxists, that power and oppression are always bad (as though laws are collectively harmful).
One of the most retarded ideas to come out of deconstructionism is the idea that all knowledge is mediated by language, which is socially constructed and so all knowledge is a social construct. This is bollocks. Thoughts occur prior to our ability to articulate them using language. They exert motivating force and are compelling regardless of whether we can express them linguistically. For example, fear makes us flee. There is an old joke that you can prove postmodernism false by releasing a hungry lion into a room of postmodernism and seeing whether they can socially construct it as harmless. A further piece of evidence against post-Derridian postmodernism is that people (babies, children and adults) have been repeatedly shown to develop winning strategies in games before they are able to explain what they are doing and before they even realise they are playing an effective strategy. Your subconscious mind is a supercomputer processing enormous volumes of information every minute to enhance your life outcomes. Its operations are not social constructs.
I am very sympathetic to Lyotard and Foucault. I think they were basically saying things that were earlier said in analytic circles in different ways. These were important ideas that ran against the contemporaneous hide tide of totalitarianism in Europe. (Incidentally, Derrida's obsession with language is similar to Wittgenstein's influence over analytical philosophers, which saw it similarly disappear up its own arse for a while).
The most famous meta-narrative is Marx's dialectic materialism, which argues that the history of social change can be explained by the forces of class struggle. This idea was an adaptation of Hegel's earlier work, which was oriented in a more fascist direction. Karl Popper, a big name in liberalism, wrote one of the longest and most influential critiques of these meta-narratives in The Open Society and Its Enemies. That was in 1945. The French didn't get there until 1979 with Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. They had a longer romance with totalitarianism and Marxism, in part because of the Algerian War, which I will get to.
The core of Popper critique of scientific method in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) is that empirical research can never access the truth because of the problem of induction. No matter how many times you observe a white swan you can't be certain there are no black swans. It may just be the case that you haven't seen the whole sample population of observations yet (i.e. you need to go to Australia). A way out of this conundrum is to focus on falsification rather than proof. If you try really hard to falsify a theory and repeatedly fail you can treat that hypothesis as fact (not truth) until such time as countervailing evidence comes to light (e.g. until someone travels to Australia and sees a black swan).
Popper's ideas, and those of many contemporary philosophers of science, jibe well with Foucault's comments, or at least I think so. Maybe I'm thinking too laterally. Foucault was arguing in a lot of his work that claims to expertise were based on shoddy scientific practice (he gets round to this in The Archaeology of Knowledge, if I remember correctly). Notions of mental illness for example, were as much grounded in socially constructed normative notions (like the sin of homosexuality) as they were in empirical evidence. There was little "knowledge" here and a lot of conjecture and power. That power was being used for oppression in a very obviously bad way.
Contemporary identity politics inverts a lot of these ideas. Meta-narratives have perhaps been done away with, but Marxist tropes of oppression and the inherent evilness of power are rampant. Far from being skeptical of experts and power, the movement is led by academics and human rights lawyers, constantly seeks interventions from governing bodies, and bases many of its claims on dubious expert evidence. See here for example, on transgenderism. Similar issues are discussed here. Far from being skeptical of truth, the movement is based on the axiomatic belief that power and inequality are bad. These are truth-claims! What's more, they are truth claims used by some interests against other interests e.g. the current rhetorical assault on white, working-class, heteronormative men by inter-sectional political actors. This is power manipulating the knowledge base and truth to further its interests. This is exactly the kind of thing postmodernism emerged to uncover and critique. We've come full circle.
I have a very Popperian attitude to epistemology, but while that means I am deeply skeptical of truth claims, it doesn't mean that I reject the notion of an objective reality, or deny that some factual claims are more valid than others. That some factual claims can be refuted is fundamental to a well-functioning society. For example, if we find that white, working-class, hetero-normative men are dying deaths of despair at unprecedented and rapidly accelerating rates, then we should pause before we call these people "privileged", especially when the people calling them that are coloured graduates of elite Ivy League universities who, on average, out-earn white graduates of those universities (I suspect this is a function of the fact that the few coloured students who do make it to university are especially gifted compared to the easier ride white kids, rather than because of statistical discrimination in favour of blacks; still, it gives pause for thought). This would seem to be a manifestation of precisely the kind of Janus-faced use of truth to cement power that postmodernism was originally meant to combat.
So what the fuck happened to postmodernism? Besides Derrida taking French philosophy up its own arse (I mean, have a look at pictures of the guy - biggest poser ever), I have two points.
First, I thought for a while that maybe it had something to do with the Algerian War. The French intellectual elite almost all despised the war (it was gross) and wrote vociferously against it. Sartre and De Beauvoir went full Marxist at this point, which is sad because Marxism does not jibe at all with existentialism and they never returned to finish existentialism once they became Marxist. French philosophy very quickly scrounged around at this time for material to use in critiques of the French government. The philosophy of empire was resurrected as a topic of inquiry and Marxist tropes were quickly brought to bear. I no longer buy this theory much though because the Algerian war was a decade before post-modernism. Foucault was contemporaneous but Lyotard is writing in the late 70s, as is Derrida and Foucault was still active. If anything, postmodernism (especially in Deleuze's writings) was about getting rid of the Marxism that had crept back in during the war years.
My other thought is that it is mostly the fault of the Americans. Intersectionality emerged in American sociology and gender-studies faculties where it borrowed heavily from post-modernism without any of the philosophical context and mixed ideas with Marxism, which is in the bedrock of both disciplines (the three progenitors of sociology are Durkheim, Weber and Marx). It then spread to literature faculties where Derridian deconstructionism was already the rage. All that arcane language mingling together produced a doctrine - postmodern identity politics - so riddled with logical contradictions as to be senseless, but there's so much dense theory floating around it is hard to see those contradictions, especially if you lack the original philosophical context and skepticism, namely regarded the stupidity of believing in verifiable objective moral truth. Most of the dumb shit in identity politics comes from believing that power and inequality are just bad while simultaneously arguing that there is no truth. The dumbest stuff in identity politics comes out of literature faculties that don't have an education in anything in particular, know nothing about epistemology, causality or statistics, and are more interested in aesthetics and things that are interesting than they are in being correct.
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| hint hint |
I'm a philosophy major, and while I mostly work in the areas of existentialism and welfare economics (an odd combination, for sure) I also did a lot of postmodernism when I was younger, and even a fair bit of epistemology because my primary mentor had been Karl Popper's PhD student and research assistant. I am very far from an expert on postmodernism (what a waste of time!) but I've read all the classics up to but not including Judith Butler (whose work to me seems to coincide with the Marxist intrusion into post-modernism theory in America).
As far as I can tell, there are three core ideas in postmodernism:
1. From Lyotard: "incredulity towards metanarratives"
2. From Foucault: Experts are biased and it is very difficult to remove this bias from empirical research practices. As such, experts should not be entirely trusted, especially in areas where it is hard to be an expert because the subject matter is heavily tied up with social constructs or not amenable to rigorous empirical methods e.g. psychotherapy and criminal justice. Who is deemed an expert is substantially a function of power and not just expertise.
3. From Derrida: deconstructionism. This is where it all turns to shit frankly. Derrida is a rambler trying to disguise poor ideas with arcane language, much like Zizek and Spivak.
This is the core of deconstructionism, from Wikipedia:
Derrida's approach consisted in conducting readings of texts with an ear to what runs counter to the intended meaning or structural unity of a particular text. The purpose of deconstruction is to expose that the object of language, and that which any text is founded upon, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible.
From Derrida comes all the tropes of insane postmodernism, namely that not only can objective truths not be empirically proven (something Popper basically says), but objective reality doesn't exist. There are only readings. All truth is socially constructed, and so all truth-claims are merely a manifestation of power. This gets particular retarded when married to the axiomatic assumption, common among campus Marxists, that power and oppression are always bad (as though laws are collectively harmful).
One of the most retarded ideas to come out of deconstructionism is the idea that all knowledge is mediated by language, which is socially constructed and so all knowledge is a social construct. This is bollocks. Thoughts occur prior to our ability to articulate them using language. They exert motivating force and are compelling regardless of whether we can express them linguistically. For example, fear makes us flee. There is an old joke that you can prove postmodernism false by releasing a hungry lion into a room of postmodernism and seeing whether they can socially construct it as harmless. A further piece of evidence against post-Derridian postmodernism is that people (babies, children and adults) have been repeatedly shown to develop winning strategies in games before they are able to explain what they are doing and before they even realise they are playing an effective strategy. Your subconscious mind is a supercomputer processing enormous volumes of information every minute to enhance your life outcomes. Its operations are not social constructs.
I am very sympathetic to Lyotard and Foucault. I think they were basically saying things that were earlier said in analytic circles in different ways. These were important ideas that ran against the contemporaneous hide tide of totalitarianism in Europe. (Incidentally, Derrida's obsession with language is similar to Wittgenstein's influence over analytical philosophers, which saw it similarly disappear up its own arse for a while).
The most famous meta-narrative is Marx's dialectic materialism, which argues that the history of social change can be explained by the forces of class struggle. This idea was an adaptation of Hegel's earlier work, which was oriented in a more fascist direction. Karl Popper, a big name in liberalism, wrote one of the longest and most influential critiques of these meta-narratives in The Open Society and Its Enemies. That was in 1945. The French didn't get there until 1979 with Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. They had a longer romance with totalitarianism and Marxism, in part because of the Algerian War, which I will get to.
The core of Popper critique of scientific method in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) is that empirical research can never access the truth because of the problem of induction. No matter how many times you observe a white swan you can't be certain there are no black swans. It may just be the case that you haven't seen the whole sample population of observations yet (i.e. you need to go to Australia). A way out of this conundrum is to focus on falsification rather than proof. If you try really hard to falsify a theory and repeatedly fail you can treat that hypothesis as fact (not truth) until such time as countervailing evidence comes to light (e.g. until someone travels to Australia and sees a black swan).
Popper's ideas, and those of many contemporary philosophers of science, jibe well with Foucault's comments, or at least I think so. Maybe I'm thinking too laterally. Foucault was arguing in a lot of his work that claims to expertise were based on shoddy scientific practice (he gets round to this in The Archaeology of Knowledge, if I remember correctly). Notions of mental illness for example, were as much grounded in socially constructed normative notions (like the sin of homosexuality) as they were in empirical evidence. There was little "knowledge" here and a lot of conjecture and power. That power was being used for oppression in a very obviously bad way.
Contemporary identity politics inverts a lot of these ideas. Meta-narratives have perhaps been done away with, but Marxist tropes of oppression and the inherent evilness of power are rampant. Far from being skeptical of experts and power, the movement is led by academics and human rights lawyers, constantly seeks interventions from governing bodies, and bases many of its claims on dubious expert evidence. See here for example, on transgenderism. Similar issues are discussed here. Far from being skeptical of truth, the movement is based on the axiomatic belief that power and inequality are bad. These are truth-claims! What's more, they are truth claims used by some interests against other interests e.g. the current rhetorical assault on white, working-class, heteronormative men by inter-sectional political actors. This is power manipulating the knowledge base and truth to further its interests. This is exactly the kind of thing postmodernism emerged to uncover and critique. We've come full circle.
I have a very Popperian attitude to epistemology, but while that means I am deeply skeptical of truth claims, it doesn't mean that I reject the notion of an objective reality, or deny that some factual claims are more valid than others. That some factual claims can be refuted is fundamental to a well-functioning society. For example, if we find that white, working-class, hetero-normative men are dying deaths of despair at unprecedented and rapidly accelerating rates, then we should pause before we call these people "privileged", especially when the people calling them that are coloured graduates of elite Ivy League universities who, on average, out-earn white graduates of those universities (I suspect this is a function of the fact that the few coloured students who do make it to university are especially gifted compared to the easier ride white kids, rather than because of statistical discrimination in favour of blacks; still, it gives pause for thought). This would seem to be a manifestation of precisely the kind of Janus-faced use of truth to cement power that postmodernism was originally meant to combat.
So what the fuck happened to postmodernism? Besides Derrida taking French philosophy up its own arse (I mean, have a look at pictures of the guy - biggest poser ever), I have two points.
First, I thought for a while that maybe it had something to do with the Algerian War. The French intellectual elite almost all despised the war (it was gross) and wrote vociferously against it. Sartre and De Beauvoir went full Marxist at this point, which is sad because Marxism does not jibe at all with existentialism and they never returned to finish existentialism once they became Marxist. French philosophy very quickly scrounged around at this time for material to use in critiques of the French government. The philosophy of empire was resurrected as a topic of inquiry and Marxist tropes were quickly brought to bear. I no longer buy this theory much though because the Algerian war was a decade before post-modernism. Foucault was contemporaneous but Lyotard is writing in the late 70s, as is Derrida and Foucault was still active. If anything, postmodernism (especially in Deleuze's writings) was about getting rid of the Marxism that had crept back in during the war years.
My other thought is that it is mostly the fault of the Americans. Intersectionality emerged in American sociology and gender-studies faculties where it borrowed heavily from post-modernism without any of the philosophical context and mixed ideas with Marxism, which is in the bedrock of both disciplines (the three progenitors of sociology are Durkheim, Weber and Marx). It then spread to literature faculties where Derridian deconstructionism was already the rage. All that arcane language mingling together produced a doctrine - postmodern identity politics - so riddled with logical contradictions as to be senseless, but there's so much dense theory floating around it is hard to see those contradictions, especially if you lack the original philosophical context and skepticism, namely regarded the stupidity of believing in verifiable objective moral truth. Most of the dumb shit in identity politics comes from believing that power and inequality are just bad while simultaneously arguing that there is no truth. The dumbest stuff in identity politics comes out of literature faculties that don't have an education in anything in particular, know nothing about epistemology, causality or statistics, and are more interested in aesthetics and things that are interesting than they are in being correct.
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