After reading Trent's message on the subject I may have to recant. :-) He knows a lot more about the history and downside of PoMo than I do. (I had no idea Foucoult and Derrida were so wicked.) But most of what Trent describes strikes me as being part of the PoMo "pose." So I'll try to reply below with the caveat that I may have no idea what I'm talking about (which rarely stops me). I'll be working on the assumption that it's possible to justify the responsible use of PoMo methods and that there exists a set of PoMos who as individuals are not merely aiming at obfuscation and self-justification.
(Or, is the use of PoMo techinques -- deconstruction, analysis, etc. -- without the irritating PoMo pose not really PoMo anymore?) On Sun, 14 Apr 2002, Dan Minette wrote: > > Actually, to me, that sounds a lot like the assertion that science is not > > about truth, but only about the testing of competing descriptions of > > events. > > But, with PoMo, there is no effective test. If the arguement is simply that > one cannot be totally objective, then I'd have lots of sympathy for it. > But, as I wrote in my response to Trent, PoMo people are totally innoculated > against falsification. Giving the PoMos a smidgen of credit, I'm not sure it's fruitful to generalize all PoMos that way (any more than it's fruitful to generalize all religious people as fundamentalists who are similarly innoculated against falsification). It seems to me that a fair assessment of responsible PoMo thought obliges us to realize that PoMo is about understanding human events and institutions and the language we use to describe them. History and literature and art and ethics and statecraft are not amenable to purely scientific analysis the way physics is. They are subject to evidence, yes, but they do not represent physical laws that can be tested under controlled circumstances. Not yet, anyway. However, because the creation of histories and art and literature and policy and propaganda are all happening all the time, there's a rich field for observation and seeing how language is used to shape "the real world" (that thing people talk about when they say, "In the *real* world, you must accept that yada yada is true.") There are PoMos out there who think physical laws like gravity basic heredity of traits are just social-linguistic constructions, and they are idiots. But there's no reason a PoMo couldn't analyze the facet of science that exists as a social institution. I'm under the impression that one of the reasons PoMo is *post*-modern is because one of its big concerns is to question the "scientific" view of infinite technical and moral progress made possible by reason which characterizes what often is called the "modern period" stretching roughly from Descartes to WW2 (or to Nietzsche, perhaps). The point is not to criticize laws of gravity or genetics as such, but the ways in which these laws are presented to society and then used to justify one policy or another. > Besides the fact that PoMo people don't like fundamentalists, why aren't > evolution creationism equally valid narratives from a PoMo point of view? A responsible PoMo would be able to separate "evolution, the falsifiable scientific theory" from "evolution, the linguistic shorthand used to describe and support a wide variety of beliefs and events." It seems to me that a PoMo could reasonably assert that creationism fails on scientific grounds and then observe that the battle between creationism and evolution in society is not just a battle for scientific truth but also a battle for control of morality, culture, and the state. In the latter arena, evolution and creationism may take on characteristics that have nothing to do with their scientific merits. It would be incumbent on the PoMo to make that distinction clear, however. It is true that all too often PoMos choose to argue on their plane of understanding without bothering to explain their perspectives and terms to their, um, victims. That's part of the PoMo pose, which we could do without. > >I think we have to separate the basic tools and techniques of PoMo, which > are useful, from the > >hipper-than-thou PoMo "pose," which isn't. > > Well, what are they besides obtuseness? Every time I try to nail a PoMo > person down, I get this elaborate complicated dance. Some laypersons would say the same about trying to get a clear and simple explanation of QM, say. The problem is that there isn't a clear and simple explanation for a laymanly definition of clear and simple, and neither is there a clear and simple description of how language is used in human society. Now, some PoMos are intellectual posers, to which I attribute the obtuseness of which you speak. But surely there must be some out there who have gotten over themselves and over grad school. It seems to me that the basic tools of PoMo, deconstruction and analysis of language, need not be tied to the kind of shifty nihilism Trent described. It seems to me that the PoMo has a point when he says that our access to history and society is through language, through competing narratives, without access to an immediate reality (the way physics has access to phenomena but not noumena). The problem is that society and history and language are all fluid and interdependent, always inventing narratives about themselves even in the process of being made, and you can't repeat an event to test it, so you build up inferences by analyzing repetitions of similar situations in art, literature, policy, language, and so on. The problem for PoMos, it seems to me, is that they often want to take this difficult feature of humanity and leap from it to some very problematic metaphysical and ethical conclusions -- that nihilism Trent mentioned -- which themselves should be undermined by the skepticism created by the slipperiness of language and truth. But people rarely question the things that make them smug. Anyway, there's my third-hand unacademic view. I suspect that we find ourselves dipping into the postmodernist toolbag on list frequently without even thinking about it; some habits of looking for the unspoken motives and assumptions behind speech -- beyond just questioning the overt logic -- have become almost unconscious. Or maybe I'm just gnawing my earlobes with my sphincter. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
