Is postmodernism retreating?

With regards to what postmodernism is post to, I understand the answer to be metanarratives. Whether it's premodern (e.g., religious mythology) or modern (e.g., scientific "mythology"), I think postmodern means they reject all types of metanarratives, which falls directly out of the view that it's all subjective relative to your social influence. There is no one true story, sez postmodernism. With that, I'll hit "post" (to what?!).

And do you think that metanarrative is true?

To be honest I'm a little fuzy on just what constitutes a modern metanarrative. There are obvious exmamples in religion (The Bible), but these are "premodern".
With respect to scientific/modern metanarratives, I don't even know if there is one, let alone if it's true.

Does the Moon really orbit the Earth or is that a WASPish power relation?

How do they know that the concept of a metanarrative itself isn't a social construction? If we deconstruct that, postmodernism might disappear in a puff of smoke.

The idea of knowledge (or at least it's presentation) being bound to a social context is certainly a valid one (as John pointed out), but they just went crazy with it. And deconstructing something by taking it apart and twisting it's intended meaning 180 degrees, seems a bit evil. That's what creationists do.

Yes, I think postmodernism is dead or dying.

Its chief positive legacy is probably deconstruction as a methodology for analyzing texts.

Its malignant legacy is moral relativism i.e. my "narrative" is as good as yours, it need not be what actually happened. The past is a sort of Library of Babel (a la Jorge Luis Borges) with an infinity of possible plots and relationships, all of them equal.

For a while, literary critics were the new historians, and history as a research discipline teetered on extinction. However, the lit crit moment passed when historians began to asked questions like: where does this leave Holocaust denial? Did millions of Jews die or not, or is it just a "narrative"? Postmodernist history, like postmodernist science, equalled trivialization.

Interesting that what killed it was a moral issue.

I have many friends in the History of Science and it's been obvious to me that they have been backing away from the stronger forms of relativism for about a decade. I suspect the real reason for this is that most of them actually like doing real history - rummaging around in archives and constructing narratives - and taking post-modernism seriously has a tendency to undermine their own discipline as much as the disciplines they're studying.

In addition, not a few of them have jumped on the popular-science-broadcasting-and-publishing
bandwagon where "theory" has about the same effect on book sales as "equations" (cf. Hawking).

Postmodernism is certainly in retreat. But it has an afterlife, ironically on the right. John Quiggin has documented the way that relativist claims are frequently peddled by global warming denialists (among others). This is ironic because often the very same people have track record of attacking left wing relativism. These people invoke relativism when they have nothing left to fall back on in support of their case.

Don't agree about analytic philosophy. Yes, it is impenetrably technical. But there's a generality/precision trade off; AP has gone for precision at the cost of generality. That's a real cost, but the benefits are real too. AP isn't well designed to tell you how to live, but I think all the (necessarily) vague true things on this topic have been said. All that's left is details, and that's what AP is good at.

Neil, I don't think you disagree with what I actually wrote - you rephrased it. As an analytic-type myself, of course I think it is worthwhile. But trying to get undergrads interested, let alone members of The Public, indicates that we need to also attend to the inspiring stuff.

On balance, postmodernism's most malignant legacy is probably what is usually called "multiculturalism".

I have to phrase this carefully, but postmodernist multiculturalism is actually what the (Indian, Nobel prize-winning) economist Amartya Sen called "plural monoculturalism". That is the belief that we all wear invisible cultural football jersies that we can never take off.

Thus, if in you culture, you can beat your wife, mutilate your children, and burn your brother's widow alive on his funeral pyre, then that is ok. "Western" culture, invented by dead white European males, has no right to interfere because that is cultural imperialism. In fact, if you do not adhere to the "core beliefs" of your culture, you are a non-person according to p-multiculturalism.

This is nonsense, but unfortunately it has done untold damage to the cause of cultural integration and true multiculturalism. The plural monocultural world is segregated and ghettoized, and its excesses are used as pretty effective arguments against any sort of cosmopolitanism.

If it is on the wane, you wouldn't know it from the new CBC series "How to Think about Science."

In one of his articles in the debate surrounding his Social Text hoax

http://physics.nyu.edu/~as2/afterword_v1a/afterword_v1a_singlefile.html

Alan Sokal argues that one of his critics is guilty of "conflat[ing] five quite distinct issues:
1) Ontology. What objects exist in the world? What statements about these objects are true?
2) Epistemology. How can human beings obtain knowledge of truths about the world? How can they assess the reliability of that knowledge?
3) Sociology of knowledge. To what extent are the truths known (or knowable) by humans in any given society influenced (or determined) by social, economic, political, cultural and ideological factors? Same question for the false statements erroneously believed to be true.
4)Individual ethics. What types of research ought a scientist (or technologist) to undertake (or refuse to undertake)?
5)Social ethics. What types of research ought society to encourage, subsidize or publicly fund (or alternatively to discourage, tax or forbid)?"

I think a lot of pomo science studies people are guilty of conflating these on a regular basis, and also of collapsing science itself with myths about or images of science.

FWIW, Bruno Latour, in a 2004 article in Critical Inquiry "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"

http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html

acknowledges a major problem with this approach:

"...In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact-as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past-but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can't I simply say that the argument is closed for good?"

A few fragments rather than a coherent comment.

Mr Wilkins is in my opinion right in his claim that there never was a coherent postmodernism in the first place but rather a ragbag of disparate development in different disciplines that got thrown together in an attempt to imitate a genuine philosophical movement.

Never really viable and totally lacking in any real substance postmodernism is withering on the vine but unfortunately several of its ghastly proponents manage to get academic appointments so we will go on suffering their vacuous twaddle for many years to come.

History of science needs postmodernism like a fish needs a bicycle.

Toby's comment about "plural multiculturalism" is unfortunately all too true but I'm not sure how much of it one can blame on the postmodernists.

Goebbels or Goering or one of those Nazis beginning with a 'G' is reputed to have said, "when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun", when I hear the word postmodernism I head very rapidly for the exit.

the main reason for decline of postmodernsm is that there are more real and complicated problems now, that the world is now a much dangerous place than it was just a few decades before.

And, you know... hardly one can declare a monster to be only a social construction when it can any time jump and bite off his leg.That works only for the polite things which can not really hurt YOU. However to dismiss as "
Nobody can say that all narratives are equal if some of them end with his mutilated body tossed into a mass grave and other don't.
No one's a relativism ever survived once he became too a subject of injustice or oppresion.

This article begins with a statement of doubt that "postmodernism was ever a coherent movement" but the assertion that there were shared themes that this word can reference.

Then we have "As concerns postmodernism, it always seemed to me that they had a strawman target. There never was a coherent tradition of 'modernism'".

If we can discuss postmodernism by referring to themes, why cannot postmodernists refer to collections of themes that are called 'modernism'?

Perhaps they could, Caledonian, if they could coherently identify themes. At least from the vantage of the creative arts, they can't, and they're proud of it.

There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in building design and literary criticism.

Indeed, there are more things in literature than are dreamt of in literary criticism. I'm glad to see that the reduction of Poe or Dickens to "phallocentrism" and "misogyny" is out of fashion. I have about had enough.

I'll tell you where postmodernism has taken hold: cartoons. Ever try to watch Adult Swim? That shit is po-mo, man! And judging by how much people that are about 12-20 like it, they're pretty postmodern themselves.

Hey, jeffk, postmo ain't limited to 12-20 somethings. Look at Ben Stein, for example, about to expel his new "documentary." (And I would say that "Robot Chicken" has a certain neo-constructionist chaos.) ;-)

The only 'modernism' the French philosophers of the 60ies, 70ies and early 80ies knew was the ideology of the French communist party, wich was dull and uninspired even by stalinist standards, and had not only backed all soviet crimes, but also all French colonial adventures, like the Algerian war and the Indochina war. Their criticism of this very stunted and degenerated form of modernism might have been justified. Sadly, this justified criticism of a certain form of modernism developed into a condemnation of modernism in general, and this developed (or degenerated) either into a condemnation of rational thinking and science, or into a nihilist "anything goes" mentality (or both).

I have never really understood the term (or the contents of) 'postmodern' when applied to anything other than architecture or, perhaps, literature!

I first encountered "post-modernism" as an architectural movement in the to early 1960's, and was in agreement with much of what I understood of it. It appeared to be a reaction to the "modern architecture" popular in the 1940's and 1950's which consisted of building ever bigger boxes of glass and steel modeled on cereal boxes but with less aesthetic merit. (Cereal boxes included some colour or pictures at least!)

The extensions of "postmodernism" to other areas has always seemed to me to be little more than intellectual posturing indulged in by mediocre academics who had nothing worthwhile to contribute but could disguise their plight by writing long, complex, treatises filled with impressive words lifted out of context from valid disciplines and strung together at random.

If it is retreating from everything except architecture, good: hopefully it will soon surrender and everyone can get on with doing useful things.

I'm surprised to find among this group of otherwise evidence-espousing readers that nobody has actually provided any evidence to these tired claims of "anything goes" and "relativism" and "social influence only...". I've been in academia for a while, and I've read widely among the po-mo authors and I just don't recognize the claims of the readers above in any of that literature. As for the narrower reference to science studies, except for a one-sentence comment by Harry Collins twenty years ago, I've yet to come across a scholar who claimed that science made no reference to nature.

It's as if evidence, reference to the real world, didn't matter when pontificating on what postmodernism is (was). How strange.

Hypothesis: Discussions about postmodernism at ScienceBlogs is like discussions about evolution at Uncommon Descent. Discuss.

t's as if evidence, reference to the real world, didn't matter when pontificating on what postmodernism is (was). How strange.

Several years ago I stumbled upon an internet course in pomo-ism. In one of the first chapters it was vigorously asserted that po-mo does not just assert thar everything is socially constructed, or there are no truths etc.. But a few chaptes further it proceeded with attacking several established scientific theories as being pure social constructions.

So. O.K.\ Maybe we are really just ignorant about what postmodernism is, so, go on, explain , what exactly does it say instead of "anything goes" ?

Well, see, we're operating within our scientismistic monoculture, and because my culture, or Alan Sokal's culture, is just as valid as any other, you can't dispute our understanding of postmodernism without privileging your culture over mine. Nyah, nyah!

Typical examples of relativist statements:

[T]he validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence.

Kenneth J. Gergen, "Feminist critique of science and the challenge of social epistemology". In Feminist Thought and the Structure of Knowledge (1998).

The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge.

Harry Collins, "Stages in the empirical programme of relativism". Social Studies of Science 11: 3-10.

Science legitimates itself by linking its discoveries with power, a connection which determines (not merely influences) what counts as reliable knowledge.

Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (1988).

Here's a classic from Katherine Hayles' 1992 paper "Gender encoding in fluid mechanics":

Despite their names, conservation laws are not inevitable facts of nature but constructions that foreground some experiences and marginalize others. [...] Almost without exception, conservation laws were formulated, developed, and experimentally tested by men. If conservation laws represent particular emphases and not inevitable facts, then people living in different kinds of bodies and identifying with different gender constructions might well have arrived at different models for [fluid] flow.

This last is, I think, grounded in Luce Irigaray.

"Hypothesis: Discussions about postmodernism at ScienceBlogs is like ... Discuss."

I find your observation intriguing, bradm. To me it seems a useful insight.

I interpret BRC's comment as an expression of frustration that something in which he can derive value appears to be discarded without examination. I've been known to discover value in things others discard, so I can empathize with that.

It seems to me this conversation could proceed along a path toward understanding differences, or along a path of escalation. I hope folks around here find value in understanding each others' views.

Cheers

Regarding a basic explanation of postmodernism, I found this page very helpful, especially the Methodologies section, and it does cover some helpful accomplishments by postmodernist critique, along with Rosenau's criticism of postmodernist contradictions (which are also mine).

It seems to me this conversation could proceed along a path toward understanding differences, or along a path of escalation. I hope folks around here find value in understanding each others' views.

You act as through those possibilities were exclusive. Why not have both?

In short: we understand your views pretty well already, and the more clearly we understand them, the more opposed we are to them.

Understanding others' views does not imply condoning them.

I think it is important to realise that the Strong Programme of Collins, Bloor and the Edinburgh School are not typical of the movement called postmodern. Sure you can find outrageous statements like those mentioned, but then you go to Foucault, especially his earlier stuff like The Order of Things and find someone who understands a lot of the material quite well. I haven't read Irigaray or Derrida or Lyotard, but the talks I go to don't inspire me to do so. But not all continental - particularly French - philosophers are postmodern in that rough sense.

A couple of links:

The SEP article.

The Wikipedia article.

The thing about pointing to Hayles as part of the problem: she has a M.A. in chemistry, so she may've been corrupted before she landed in an English department.

Also, Hayles work isn't indebted to Irigaray or Butler. In fact, her major work -- How We Became Posthuman -- works against the notion of radical subjectivity, inasmuch as she believes such claims to be insufficiently grounded in the material reality of the human body. (Shorter: if you think of her title as a question, her answer would be "we didn't.")

John, you would laugh out of town anybody who wrote an intellectual history of Marxism or positivism or any other philosophical movement in the "Postmodernism, threat or menace" fashion one finds in this thread. I don't know how you go about criticizing the critics, however, since they are protected by their own confusion and ignorance of what's gone on since around 1960, very little of which comes down to the zillionth version of cultural relativism. Instead of cherry picking the absurdities of various academic fops, a procedure that says more about the foibles of assistant professors than the vicissitudes of Poststructural thought, you might at least point to people like Peter Gallison or Ian Hacking or any of the many others who have made the last thirty years or so something of a golden age for historical explanations of science. It's just as reasonable (or unreasonable) to call them postmodernists as anybody else and Hacking, as I recall, has actually over Foucault's chair at Paris.

What we have here is a giant straw man. Phooey.

Jim, read my post again. Then tell me that I mistreated postmodernism by globally caricaturing it.

There have been useful influences on other traditions, and many historians I know rather like it. But the relativistic aspect of its epistemology, if one may say there is such a unitary beast, is malign, and can be dismissed now, I think. Relativity doesn't imply epistemic nihilism.

John,

I was irritated by the tone of many of the comments, not your original post, hence my line about the "Postmodernism, threat or menace" approach one finds in the thread.

Most of the polemics I encounter about postmodernism are simply cultural politics. Now it is true that over the last several years plenty of assistant professors have generated a tremendous amount of meaningless verbiage in an attempt to get tenure; but Postmodernism isn't responsible for that tendency, which existed long before the French invasion. Anyhow, it is an empirical fact that European intellectual fashions always decay into vague relativism in America. Meanwhile, there are very, very few philosophers of science who are radical skeptics, though there are plenty, myself included, who are interested in explaining why one explanation gets excepted rather than another, a question that pretty much has to have a sociological answer unless you are an an absolute idealist and think that the Truth of Things somehow actualizes itself in the science journals without human intervention.

Jim's clarification, describing exactly what he was responding to, and why, seems to me an example of moderating the flow of conversation in a productive way. That's what I was getting at when I mentioned escalation earlier. As a former referee/moderator/facilitator at a conversation web site, there are certain behavior signals that I've learned to associate with a particularly counterproductive form of escalation. Calling attention to the escalation mechanism sometimes creates an opportunity to redirect it.

My interest in the verbal behaviors demonstrated in the course of conversation has little relation to my views on this Ism, that Ism, or any Ism. Participants who might be tempted to categorize my views on the Ism du jour based on my interest in conversational learning might reach an inaccurate conclusion.

Cheers

I'm not a philosopher by a long shot, but IMO the thing which undermined postmodernism in the minds of many scientists is a tendency for some scholars to treat models of reality as texts which can be deconstructed in the same way as, say, a book or a speech. Essays about how relativity is "clearly" just a heavily sexed*, antifeminist theory and therefore should be overthrown don't really do much for the subject's crediblity, especially as it's often the only postmodernism scientists are exposed to.

*Something to do with the way it gives the speed of light a special position over all other velocities. They would've preferred a theory which gave all speeds and equal place, regardless of relativity's fit to the data.

Essays about how relativity is "clearly" just a heavily sexed, antifeminist theory and therefore should be overthrown don't really do much for the subject's crediblity, especially as it's often the only postmodernism scientists are exposed to.

This is exactly the stunt people pulled in my literature classes. I pissed one woman off finally by asking her if she believed in the science that allowed her to drive her car to class every day. I'm not making this up.

The fact remains that I spent way too much time arguing against atoms or galaxies as "purely semantic constructions" (which on some level is true, but not in a paradoxically absolute sense). Professors are the ones who must take responsibility (and literature professors especially) for how they present postmodernism to their students.

How a philosophy is actually applied trumps its pure or original intention, just as how Christianity actually manifests itself in the world trumps all the "Yes, but..." claims ("They weren't real Christians," or "Scripture really says...").

Unfortunately, in the real world, most ideas are caricatured anyway. Scientific ideas especially are mangled in the humanities (one reason that I've become disillusioned with the humanities) and in current events mags. Everyone here gets driven nuts by it. But when the humanities enthusiasts caricature their own ideas, that's really the final straw.

(At least it was for me. Literary theory has become so full of crap that I shun writers' groups like the plague. The world does not need one more "healing narrative.")

I'm not a philosopher by a long shot, but IMO the thing which undermined postmodernism in the minds of many scientists is a tendency for some scholars to treat models of reality as texts which can be deconstructed in the same way as, say, a book or a speech.

No, what undermined postmodernism in scientists' minds is a tendency of some scholars to completely ignore reality and substitute their own pet obsessions for it without concern for evidence or even coherence.

You can't deconstruct books or speeches that way, either.

Postmodernists never retreat, they merely advance in a different and equally valid direction.

...besides, casting it in terms of retreating is merely a projection and affirmation of a masculinized, militaristic and revanchist hegemony of post-colonial reactionarianism and para-capitalistic deglobalization...

...know what I mean?

Well, the phrase "the downside was that by and large what they got was an emasculated, subjective, uncritical kind of philosophy" might give one reason to wonder. Just what exactly is an "emasculated" philosophy, anyway?

SC wrote:

Just what exactly is an "emasculated" philosophy, anyway?

According to atheists - agnosticism [stir, stir...]

ThonyC said

Goebbels or Goering or one of those Nazis beginning with a 'G' is reputed to have said, "when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun" ....

Whichever one said it, I believe the quote is

when I hear the word culture I reach for my Browning.

Nazis could be witty as well as evil.

Are any participants still interested in this article?
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One of the main marks of modernism is that it opens civilization up to plurality.
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Post modernism is not so much an action on the the Grand Narratives as it is an era during which science~~itself~~is under attack by those who want to do away with pluralism.
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I can elucidate if anyone is interested.
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