Posted on 11/28/2001 4:13:52 AM PST by shrinkermd
Oh, really?
Hear! Hear!
Having tied themselves into rhetorical knots, they then try to rescue their argument by casting aloof judgments and falling back on the oldest practice extant -- superiority of numbers. Believing in anything is an obsolete construct, and you're not hip if you cling to those old notions.
In fact, a lot of this claptrap is retreaded Existentialism (if you don't mind an obsolete construct) or Nihilism with a fresh coat of paint.
That's not to say there is no role or purpose to criticism. But it should be a means to some greater end. Not an end in itself. So nicely put!
I encountered postmodernism in one of graduate social science courses witout knowing what it was (as I learned later, they do that all the time: sneak into some field and hijack it; it's the only way since they failed to present themselves as philosophers). At first, there was a sustained attack on positivism that was a complete nonsense: having heard and misunderstood a few words of 18th-century physics in high school, they falsely impute to science some qualities and proceeed to criticise that nonexisting attribute. After succesfully defending the scientific method and trying to end on a good note, I asked: "Suppose it is true that positivism as the basis for scientific method is completely flawed, what should I use instead when conducting a survey or perfoming any other measurement?" I'll never forget the instructor's spirited exclamation: "I don't know; you tell me!"
As you said earlier, a couple of hours of dismantling everything that works to some degree --- in hard sciences to a great degree! --- was the end in itself. I could not anderstand the feeling at the time, but I left that discussion longing to take a shower.
Apropos of your observation about "empty content," here is an award winning sentence from a few years back by UC Berkeley Prof. Judith Butler, queer theorist and poststrucuralist extraordinaire. The award wasn't one she expected however. She received it in a Bad Writing Contest for the "ugliest, most stylistically awful sentence found in a scholarly book or article..."
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the questions of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The runner-up was the University of Chicago's Homhi Bhabha, who produced this remarkable sentence in his book Locations of Culture:
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate efforts to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
Amazing stuff, isn't it? Why would any author think that such obscure cant is content-rich rather than content-barren. Butler and Bhabha come from the postmodern wing of the academy, where, as Locke notes above, adherents have displayed an affinity for contorted syntax, a love of neologisms, and a weakness for the bizarre notion that to deconstruct linguistic categories is to reconstruct society.
Do you happen to remember in which of his works he said that? Please let me know if you do.
Tom Wolfe also quotes this on page 13 of "Hooking Up" A national bestseller of 2000. The first few chapters are outstanding, but the rest is a filler.
Well, I don't know about all that, bb, but I do believe there is much more involved here than academic niche building.
Nor am I attempting to construct some grand conspiracy, either; however, I would point out that one of the guiding principles of psychological warfare is that if you wish to change the behavior of a people, you first change their language. For example, you might stop talking about "personal responsibility" and instead begin talking about "self-actualization," substituting the second for the first. Once you're successful, not only have you changed the patois of the natives, as it were, you've also subtly changed how they think about their own actions. No longer do they feel personally responsible for "doing good" and avoiding "doing bad," as they did when "personal responsibility" was a common concept; now, under "self-actualization" they are beginning to look for ways to make themselves "feel better about themselves" - and if you've managed to throw in "triangulation" and other cute little "post-modernisms," if it happens that they don't feel better about themselves, it's always the fault of someone else.
And thus is a society changed.
Yes, it's easily debunked here in placed like FR, and on most college campuses and in most philosophy departments, but put into effect "among the masses" by people qualified to conduct psyops maneuvers, it's another kettle of fish alltogether.
1. Most of us on FR and in our country at large have no idea that modernism has come to an end. Most don't even know the facets post-modernism. That modernism has come to an end, in fact, is a morbid thought: the Enlightenment project has been all but buried.
2. Reactions, as in "deconstructing deconstructionism" often come from those who are left-overs of the old ideal of rationalism.
3. Reactions that are based in Christianity suffer the same criticism: most religious thinking has long ago capitulated to the modernism and they cannot distinguish between the two.
4. Belly laughs are reserved for the gods, we are obliged to understand before we dispose.
5. Esoteric writing is no excuse for dismissal; it only means the initiates should continue preparation. This is because there is no short cut to what is complex.
6. Study of the enemy can only be done by the strong and able.
We could ask Noam Chomsky. He's spent the last 20 years trying to teach dogs and monkeys to talk. Since he's got such support among the Left, I can only assume that his latter endeavor met with some degree of success.
ROFL!!
Every now and then you crack me up. That was a good one, indeed. BTW, I read somewhere recently that all those different words for snow among the Eskimos has been discredited; unfortunately, I can't remember where I read/heard it. Your point is still valid, however, even without that example. There simply isn't any way we can be anything more than we think, and how we think is represented by how we speak; therefore, we can be either uplifted or constrained by our language. Three guesses on which way the deconstructionists want to take us (up or down)...
I hadn't heard about the "snow" story being debunked. Even our own meterologists have half a dozen different kinds of snow, so it would surprise me if the Eskimos didn't. But the point is taken ...
The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing -- that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
I am more than I think! My identity transcends what I am able to think and say about it. If it is captured, that's the end, logos. I can be managed as anyone. But no, I refuse that, because I know that being endowed by the creator is more than language can decipher. This is true human freedom (and the presupposition of choice and willing).
But then, I suspect you and I, if not only I, would in some ways do much better as hermits. ;)
Okay, but this misses the point. The thesis of scientism is that ITS object of study is the ONLY object of study.
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