ironcrane7 said:When my faith starts to slip away, I turn to Heidegger to save the day. My German isn't great, it's true, But if they see me with a book or two, The folks at the local School, or even the profs, Will think I've mastered the deepest of offs.
👍
It looks like there are still plenty of poetic responses out there exposing the real reason people dive into "heavy" literature. Honestly, sometimes I feel like Heidegger is one of the main culprits behind why we—the poor socialites, the humanists, and the philosophers—have become such easy targets for everyone's jokes. 😢 🙄
1. Postmodernists tend to wrap their lack of actual philosophical or scientific substance in this impenetrable, indigestible prose. If they just wrote clearly, their emptiness would be exposed instantly.
2. Just because something is incomprehensible doesn't mean it's profound. (Check out that first link I sent—the postmodernism generator)
3. These folks love to hijack terminology from the hard sciences—without actually grasping the underlying concepts—only to peddle interpretations that are fundamentally flawed, inconsistent, and just plain nonsensical.
4. To mask their inconsistency and lack of analytical clarity—which, let’s be honest, is a prerequisite for anyone calling themselves a philosopher or a scientist—postmodernists hide behind claims of total relativity and the impossibility of true knowledge. They argue that standard science and philosophy (the kind built on logic and empirical evidence) are merely one system among many, essentially operating under an "anything goes" mantra. But if that's really the case, why have they fought so hard to occupy the social sciences and humanities departments at universities across the country? And why are they so incredibly thin-skinned when faced with criticism, if "anything goes"?
Just because we hold diametrically opposed views or come from totally different backgrounds doesn't mean we can't have a decent debate and poke some fun at each other along the way 😁
Alright, let me try to keep this brief.
I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Sokal affair, but I really don't have the energy to recount the whole saga right now—you can dig into the specifics via the other link. In short, a physicist named Sokal submitted a completely nonsensical paper to a postmodern journal called Social Text, and they actually published it. It passed peer review, and nobody realized it was a total hoax. Of course, once the dust settled, it sparked a massive scandal and a heated debate over the actual validity of postmodern philosophy and everything else bundled up with it. I pasted the Dawkinsian commentary because I think his take is incredibly straightforward and lucid—written in a clean, popular science style rather than that dense, impenetrable mess you get from modern French thinkers 😉
Because of that, I can't exactly dive into every single niche thesis put forward by postmodernist thinkers—I'm just not intimately acquainted with all of them—but I can certainly tackle some of their fundamental premises. Besides, the title of this thread is the IDEA of postmodernism, which suggests we should be questioning those very foundations.
But wait—don't the postmodernists argue they're just "playing games"? I mean, isn't the core of their entire philosophy built on the idea that anything goes? They suggest there's no such thing as absolute truth, that every piece of writing holds the same weight, and that no single perspective deserves special treatment. If we're following their own logic regarding relative truth, isn't it a bit hypocritical to call them out for messing around with linguistic puzzles or pulling little pranks on their readers? Maybe so, but it leaves you asking a bigger question: why is their work so incredibly, mind-numbingly dull? If you're going to play games, shouldn't they at least be fun, rather than being so stuffy, self-important, and pretentious? Even more revealing—if they’re supposedly just joking around, why do they throw such massive temper tantrums when someone decides to pull a fast one on them? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and instead of the amused laughter you'd expect after such a masterclass in deconstructive maneuvering, his success was met with total outrage. It seems that once you've successfully climbed into the halls of the establishment, it stops being funny when someone comes along to deflate your oversized ego.
...
I've highlighted the key sentence, just for Amanda Fowler2. 🙂
in similar manner , Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-François Lyotard's 'post-modern science', and those all too common, totally predictable ways people misuse Gödel's Theorem, quantum theory, and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only One of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again , Sokal and Bricmont Help US by analysing The tricks being played. This specific sentence—which, despite being packed with scientific jargon, is essentially gibberish from a scientific perspective—is a perfect example:
"Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes."
I’ll stop quoting there—mostly because, as Sokal and Bricmont point out, Baudrillard’s prose just "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense." They really drive home how much scientific and pseudo-scientific fluff is crammed into sentences that, as far as anyone can tell, don't actually mean anything. In fact, their critique of Baudrillard could easily apply to pretty much any of the authors being torn apart here who happen to be lionized throughout America:
"In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away. "
Deleuze and Guattar have written and collaborated on Books described by The celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, aren't buying it: "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge."
The problem is, that’s a pretty tall order for the average reader. Look, I get it—there are probably ideas so deep and complex that most of us wouldn't recognize the language they're written in even if it hit us in the face. But there’s also that other kind of writing: language specifically engineered to be incomprehensible just to hide the fact that there’s no actual substance behind it. How are we supposed to tell where one ends and the other begins? What if you actually need a PhD just to figure out if the emperor is wearing any clothes at all? Specifically, how can we tell if this trendy style of French 'philosophy'—which its followers have basically hijacked huge swaths of American academia—is actually profound, or if it's just empty rhetoric from a bunch of high-brow con artists?
Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics AT , respectively, New York University and University of Louvain. They've kept their critique focused on the books that actually try to borrow concepts from physics and math. Since that's their home turf, they actually know what they're talking about, and they don't pull any punches. Take Jacques Lacan, for instance—a guy whose name is treated like gospel in humanities departments across US and British universities, mostly because he mimics a deep grasp of mathematics:
"... although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish."
...
Then there's the feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray, who gets her own dedicated chapter from Sokal and Bricmont. In a stretch of writing that feels a bit like a certain infamous feminist take on Newton's Principia (calling it a "rape manual"), Irigaray claims that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation." Her reasoning? Apparently, it "privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"—and let me tell you, I'm quickly learning that "vital" is a massive buzzword in these circles. It’s classic for this school of thought to tackle fluid mechanics, too. The idea is that fluids have been unfairly ignored because "masculine physics" is obsessed with rigid, solid objects. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made The mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in somewhat clearer terms. This gives us a rare, unobstructed look at the situation, and yeah, the emperor is definitely naked:
"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she 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."
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to spot the sheer absurdity of an argument like that—honestly, we've heard this tune far too often lately—but it certainly helps to have Sokal and Bricmont around to point out the actual reason why turbulent flow is such a nightmare: the Navier-Stokes equations are just incredibly hard to solve.
Amanda Fowler2 said:I’d appreciate it if this thread didn't get bogged down by common-sense lecturing from >. I've got work tonight, so I'll pick back up with postmodernism tomorrow morning. >, please weigh in—this is honestly just total nonsense.
Fair enough—I already knew postmodernists weren't exactly known for their groundedness. But what happened to your whole "anything goes" philosophy???
As far as I'm concerned, the mods can scrub my posts if they want, but please leave these snippets from the "down-to-earth" Richard Dawkins. Maybe reading them will give some of these postmodernists a much-needed reality check.
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
"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."
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattar, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattar goes on indefinitely in this Vein and offers , in The opinion of Sokal and Bricmont "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered".
mistyfox812 said:I caught your signature. As for those points you labeled 2, 3, and 4—they’re really just different ways of saying the same thing. I tried to lay out my take on the end of philosophy and how cybernetics fits into that picture in my very first post.
Don't sweat it—just think of them as footnotes. 😁
And honestly, I think quite a few of the arguments in your opening post are pretty problematic—even if they are incredibly interesting to chew on.
mistyfox812 said:1. My main contribution to this thread was pretty much inspired by Heideggerian thought: philosophy is reaching its finish line, and cybernetics is stepping up to take the stage.
2. It looks like crimsonjackal8 is on board with that. But unlike me, he isn't losing sleep over where exactly we're steering this massive ship of science and technology. He’s really just a man of his era.
3. So, what’s the ultimate ideal of our age? How do we inherit all the evolution that brought us to this specific point—this peak we find ourselves standing on?
4. One modern figure actually managed to distill our era's deepest cravings into a single mantra: DRIVE A MERCEDES AND SHOOT MISSILES. And crimsonjackal8 seems perfectly fine with that.
5. Heidegger didn't see it that way: 'Only a God can save us now.' In my next post on this, I'll drop in a quote from Nietzschean Zarathustra regarding the "last humans."
Don't be so dramatic. As long as N and H have figured it out, it's fine. 🙄 You can think what you want...
1. As far as I can tell, philosophy is still very much alive and kicking. (If philosophy had actually hit a dead end, library shelves wouldn't be overflowing with Baudrillard, Lyotard, and people writing commentaries on their commentaries 🙄). All that doom and gloom about technology hasn't really played out the way people predicted. And what's this supposed "inverse relationship" between cybernetics and philosophy? What would it even mean if we lived in a Star Trek future and philosophers couldn't exist? 🙄
2. You've got it wrong—both regarding the agreement and where we fit into this era. 😛
3. We still need to reach an understanding on that one 🤔 While there are enough of us left to actually have a conversation.
4. 🙂 (check my signature)
5. You could also bring up Fukuyama and his "end of history" thesis. It's irrelevant.
Amanda Fowler2 said:I'm honestly not sure what you were trying to get at with that third link.😕
Look, I don't have a clue what Lacan was getting at when he claimed the phallus is the root of negative one—nor do I grasp, to borrow your own phrasing, "the Foucauldian redefinition of social power and the necessity of moving beyond Greece as a pretentious demand for the universality and comprehensiveness of systemic philosophy," or even "Baudrillard’s thesis regarding humanity’s post-historical abandonment of reality, where the subject is reduced to an object due to its inability to redefine itself."😵
To a layman like me, though, the whole lot feels like a blind alley of Western thought—just writing for the sake of writing, a kind of pseudo-philosophy that ignores all standard criteria. There are plenty of essays out there covering that exact topic over on that site about the Sokal affair.
As for this entire debate here on the forum, it strikes me as a potential answer to the "postmodern challenge"—except perhaps the "answer" isn't actually addressing a challenge at all. Instead, it looks more like a massive misunderstanding, a complete failure by an entire generation of thinkers who simply got tangled up in a totally hollow narrative.
I'm stuck on how to feel about it. I certainly don't buy the author's naive, science-driven optimism, but if I'm being honest, there are some pretty sharp, lucid moments tucked away in those comments...
Sorry for the sarcasm here, but the word "postmodernism" always triggers this kind of reflex in me. It’s probably just a side effect of spending way too many hours stuck in sterile debates with self-proclaimed postmodernists 🙄
Look, I'm clearly no expert on all of this 🙄 But I can see that within this discussion, there might actually be a way out of this so-called postmodern crisis 😕
Basically, I still believe that science and non-postmodernist philosophy will eventually provide the answers we're looking for. 👋
Because if I need some backup, I’m calling in the Frenchmen Hey babe, you know what Deleuze said? I just need to talk absolute nonsense about something, to kill my stage fright with Baudrillard!
I honestly think we make a pretty great pair if Lyotard decides to bring us together, so come closer—don't be shy, it's all Inter Miami, meta, posts, and Derrida!
Postmodernism is basically dead and gone but the chaos is still going strong and I’ll happily take the title of chief troublemaker while I dive deep into studying those Frenchmen!
Linda Rodriguez6 said:Eric Clapton, The White Stripes are actually from the USA.
Doesn't really matter. Both the USA and England are destined to be working-class nations anyway...
I wonder if The Jesus and Mary Chain can still pass for a British band. I mean, they have those Scot roots and all that... They're easily one of my favorites 🙏 🙏 🙏