Peddling Stupidity
Or, the postmodern scholarship of “radical cyber-feminist” Carolyn Guertin.
Thanks to the blogging psychoanalyst, Shrinkwrapped, I came across a doctoral dissertation called, rather implausibly, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: the Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory. The work in question, by “radical cyber-feminist” Carolyn G. Guertin, is apparently the basis of a forthcoming book of the same name. Faced with such an imposing title, one can practically hear the boundaries of human knowledge squealing as they expand. Naturally, I had to find out more.
On visiting Guertin’s website, I discovered that the author is a Senior McLuhan Fellow in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. As a “scholar of women’s art and literature and new media arts,” Dr Guertin also shapes young minds at the Universities of Athabasca and Guelph, Canada, and is a frequent guest speaker at conferences and events across Europe. Her works, I learned, have been published “in print, online and in real space.”
Space crops up quite a bit in Guertin’s dissertation, as do various mathematical, quantum mechanical and geometric terms, the bulk of which are misused in a series of strained and incoherent metaphors. In keeping with many purveyors of postmodern theorising, Guertin has been careful to appropriate fragments of scientific terminology that sound fashionable and exciting, and uses them with no apparent regard for their meaning or relevance. (Entanglement and Hilbert Space are mentioned casually, with no explanation, and for no discernible reason.)
Consequently, it’s difficult to fathom the author’s supposed intention, or to determine exactly how far short of that objective her efforts have fallen. Instead, we’re presented with what amounts to a collage of grandiose jargon, habitual non sequitur and unrelated subject matter – including feminism, web browsing and space-time curvature – bolted together by little more than chutzpah:
And,
And furthermore,
I hope that’s clear to everyone.
Guertin takes care to drop the obligatory menu of names – Baudrillard, Burroughs, Deleuze, Derrida, Gibson and Guattari among them – though the actual relevance of many citations is, again, far from clear. The more sceptical among us may even suspect a number of them have been included arbitrarily or for reasons of cultish connotation, rather than for any logical or evidential relevance.
I should, I think, mention that Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze have been debunked at length in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book, Intellectual Impostures, chiefly for producing “a handful of intelligible sentences – sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous,” and for what the authors describe as “the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered.” Readers unfamiliar with Guattari’s prose may benefit from a mercifully brief, and by no means unusual, example:
At this point, readers may detect a strange similarity of Guertin’s chosen prose style with that of Guattari. It needn’t be Guattari, of course. It might as well have been Baudrillard or Derrida, or half of the names in Guertin’s annotations. One ream of postmodern gibberish is difficult to distinguish from any other, and this is not by accident. Buzzwords and citations are carefully chosen – along with gratuitous neologisms and misused terminology – generally to build sentences of such opacity and length that readers will be suitably intimidated.
The intention behind such wilfully unintelligible text is, it seems, not to invite thought or reward it, but to repel and discourage it. This is done by exhausting the reader’s efforts to comprehend and reducing him to a state of demoralised dishonesty, whereby absurd and vacuous statements are repeated and endorsed, regardless of incomprehension and for fear of appearing stupid. By publicly endorsing vacuity, and making great claims in its name, the unsuspecting student is thus painted into a corner and any subsequent rethinking entails an intolerable loss of face and credibility. Few of us like to admit to being duped, least of all those who have been duped rather badly. This may explain the heated defensiveness that often surrounds even the most absurd material of this kind.
Postmodern prose is perhaps best approached as an exercise in posturing and phonetics – of couching slim and trite observations in needlessly Byzantine language; or as what Sokal and Bricmont refer to as “a gradual crescendo of nonsense.” Efforts to fathom deep meaning, or, very often, meaning of any kind, are generally exhausting and rarely rewarded. More often, what you’ll find is essentially a pile of language, carefully disorganised so as to obscure a lack of content.
As Shrinkwrapped notes, Guertin’s ‘conclusion’ is suitably postmodern, mulling as it does on the difficulty of arriving at a conclusion. In a rare moment of relative lucidity, we learn: “The whole concept of reaching a conclusion or drawing conclusions is, of course, antithetical to the nature of this kind of literature as much as to my aims in this work as a whole.” It goes without saying that conclusions are much easier to write if one has actually done the work to draw a conclusion from, and it’s theoretically possible one might feel a flickering of sympathy for Ms Guertin at this point. Instead of making any attempt to focus her thoughts, such as they are, or to clarify her aims, whatever they may be, Guertin veers from vacuous pseudo-argument to vacuous pseudo-poetry, and resorts to listing a series of words – again, in no perceptible order:
This goes on for some time:
And so on.
It’s important to understand that nonsense of this kind is rarely arrived at by accident. It’s highly unlikely that mere clumsiness and mental dullness would produce such determined vacuity. It’s less probable still that so many academics and students would, by chance and dullness alone, produce vacuity with such eerie uniformity. To produce ‘work’ of the generic emptiness shown above – or seen here, or here, or here or here – requires practice and dedication, and no small dishonesty. One might forgive genuine stupidity and a lack of mental wherewithal, but when people who aren’t entirely stupid are determined to peddle stupidity as the height of intellectual sophistication, well, that’s harder to excuse. In a saner world, Guertin and her peers would be laughed out of every room they entered. And a gentle pelting with soft fruit wouldn’t go amiss.
In my recent discussion with Ophelia Benson, I suggested that PoMo ‘theorising’ has most obviously served far-left ideologues, specifically those, like Guertin, whose ideas wouldn’t withstand scrutiny of the most elementary kind. One notes, for instance, the number of PoMo traffickers who label themselves as “activists” or “radicals” of various far-left causes. And one notes that almost all of the architects and key figures of politicised postmodernism have embraced leftist politics, often of an extreme kind. If, to quote Foucault, “reason is the ultimate language of madness”, and if, as Jean-Francois Lyotard argued, notions of truth and clarity are synonymous with “prisons and prohibitions,” then adherents of this view are free to believe whatever they wish to believe, regardless of contrary evidence or logical errors, and regardless of the practical fallout of such beliefs.
If texts can be read to mean almost anything, and if anachronistic subtexts can be projected to suit the reader’s own political prejudice, then a world of illusion and false opportunity has been opened. If hierarchies of knowledge and value are conveniently flattened into a spectrum of equally valid “narratives,” then one can claim that the second-hand ‘revelations’ of Muhammad are equal in rigour and sophistication to the epistemology of David Hume, or that aboriginal rock painting is on an aesthetic par with Bach; or that gender is entirely a social construction with no biological basis. Or, against all evidence to the contrary, that Socialism is compatible with individual freedom and general prosperity.
Some, like Simon Blackburn, have argued that postmodern theorising isn’t that bad, some of it at least; and besides, we’re assured, its influence is fading. Well, let’s hope so. But politicised PoMo has for decades cast its shadow over the Humanities and over hundreds of thousands of minds. Many of which have been encouraged to disassemble the tools of rational thought in order to repeat political preferences of a remarkably similar kind, and in a remarkably similar way. Others have learned to obfuscate, to be dishonest and to see meaning where none exists, if only to further their careers or to avoid looking foolish in the company of fools. And this doesn’t foster scepticism and the testing of ideas; it leads to dullness and credulity.
In Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom quote David Lehman’s Signs of the Times, a lamentation on the state of English departments, in which he recounts being told, “If you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a Marxist, otherwise you’re not taken seriously. It doesn’t matter what you know. What counts is your theoretical approach. And this means knowing jargon.” As I’ve noted elsewhere, the pervasiveness of postmodern theory is uniquely pernicious in that it has explicitly marginalised expectations of accuracy, coherence and truth in favour of ostentatious political conformity. The basic tools of discernment have thus been dismissed as “Eurocentric”, “patriarchal” or unfairly distributed. Some might call this intellectual vandalism. This is the legacy of postmodern thought, as trafficked by many academics of the left – the ‘freedom’ to blunt the senses and be triumphantly, shamelessly wrong. Provided, of course, everyone is wrong in exactly the same, triumphant, way.
Carolyn Guertin’s “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” can be read here. And, please, no laughing. 
@TDK
I wasn’t talking about Guertin, as I subsequently made clear in my post at 20.10 on April 14. Indeed, I don’t think from skimming the sample of her work that David pointed to that the question of its merit even arises.
And as I also suggested, the ‘unsettling of assumptions’ is not something that only ‘pomo’ does (should ‘pomo’ exist as a readily identifiable, unified phenomenon, whatever it is). Hume aimed to unsettle assumptions about induction; Kant aimed to unsettle the assumptions of empiricism and religious dogmatism; conceptual analysis of a philosophical nature (whoever is practising it) generally proceeds in this direction, even if in its stated aims it only looks for clarification. Unfortunately, a lot of cultural studies bods use the phrase as if they invented it to describe an entirely self-justifying practice (when it becomes the equivalent of an artist using the phrase ‘exploring issues of ‘ in their MA show catalogue entry).
My main disgust at PoMo writers is not because of the trivia that they write (freedom of expression is afterall still a right), but that they take advantage of the public’s trust and respect of the intellectual honesty of subjects such as Mathematics and Physics, and by quoting Mathematical and Physics concepts (of which they have no understanding whatever), to give their own outpourings the same degree of respectability. PoMo writers are in effect, imposters of the worst kind.
In addition, such PoMO garbage debases Physics and Mathematics by association. But PoModernists do not care, for they are afterall in the business of destruction of all ideas that underlie the West.
It might be better to speak more generally of _bringing everyday assumptions into fresh relief_, and of _testing_ them, and so on, rather than, as if solely, of _unsettling_ them. In fact one often deals not with everyday assumptions themselves, but rather with one’s habitual formulations of those everyday assumptions. Sometimes it helps to be aware of scientific ideas, since they may help one notice, at the phenomenological level, things or patterns that one might otherwise miss.
Not that there’s something so automatically bad about aiming to unsettle some kind of assumptions. I would imagine that young scientists often hope to unsettle some theory or other, in order to have some big things to do, some sort of work left for them to do after the strides of the giants which they studied in school. Art and literature tend to unsettle some of our habitual ways of feeling about things. The unsettlement of everyday assumptions is a different thing and does suggest, when repeatedly stated that way — “thematized” in that form — a political aim or ideological aim in some contexts, (A) to change not just our formulations of everyday assumptions but the assumptions themselves, and (B), to unsettle the existing order. Not that there’s something automatically bad about wanting to change people’s minds or unsettle an existing order, or something automatically bad about making that sort of thing one’s particular aim through philosophy. If such things never happened in philosophy, that would be a very bad sign. Yet to say that such is all philosophy’s definitive commitment is to prejudge philosophical results and to let the pomo folks frame the debate. I doubt that Rochenko intends that. So just a little rephrasing seems in order.
I’m not entirely convinced that many proponents of PoMo actually do want to test ideas and assumptions, least of all their own. There is, for instance, a remarkable conformity of political leaning among PoMo academics, and the targets of politicised deconstruction are fairly predictable. “Hegemony” is a favoured buzzword, but the hegemony of leftist postmodernism in large areas of academia is mysteriously exempt from scrutiny.
PoMo rhetoric is often characterised by endless, often ludicrous, attempts to construe capitalism and/or individualism as pathological and depraved. It’s difficult to imagine a PoMo thesis that didn’t refer to capitalism or bourgeois values or Western society as in some way “problematical” or “oppressive”; and if a PoMo paper did omit these things, it might well be regarded as missing its most vital component. Or its reason to exist.
It’s never been clear to me just what post-modernism is, so the following may not be an example. My suspicions are aroused only because the analysis is unconvincing and infected with politics, two characteristics that seem always to accompany post-modernism. If it does reflect post-modernist notions, however, it marks a particularly ironic achievement. For not only has post-modernism misappropriated the language of science; it has also convinced some scientists to adopt the perspective of post-modernism.
The Lancet 2007; 369:274
DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60146-9
Correspondence
The language of war in biomedical journals
Erik von Elm and Markus K Diener
The “war on terrorism” was declared by the governments of the USA and allied countries 5 years ago. Now wars are being declared in a great many areas of civil life including health care. In biomedical journals we read about wars on everything from renal cancer1 to uncertainty in trauma care.2 The use of war rhetoric has been justified by the numbers of victims, which, in many instances, exceed those of real wars.
“Collateral damage” is another piece of military jargon that is being used increasingly in biomedical communication. Within the US Army it is defined as the “unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities.”3 However, it has become a synonym for any kind of undesired consequence including the side-effects of new cancer therapies1 and even the effects of obstructive sleep apnoea on bed partners.4
As part of modern propaganda, “doublespeak” terms such as collateral damage trivialise violations of international humanitarian law—ie, the killing of civilians. They aim to blur the images of war that would come to mind if we were confronted with accurate descriptions. Even medical terms have been introduced into military language for this purpose: “surgical strikes” being carried out not with scalpels but high-tech bombs.
Of course, there are many more examples of how military terminology is corrupting biomedical communication. We are used to reading about “killer cells” or “vaccine shots”. Inevitably, the close relationship between medicine and the military in history has left a mark on the language. However, military jargon is inappropriate if it is used uncritically to spice up manuscripts. The responsible use of language should be part of the integrity of both scientists and journalists.
George Orwell was intrigued by the powerful role of words. He advised us “never [to] use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent”.5 With military jargon his rule should be observed even more meticulously. Why not call treatments by their proper names or use less belligerent comparisons at least?
Physicians and researchers should avoid the cynical logic of war when writing about care of patients. However, concise reports on the consequences that real wars have on human health deserve more attention in scientific publishing. And they do not need fancy words to be compelling.
——
And here’s an article in The Scientist inspired the letter:
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=active&c2coff=1&q=site%3Awww.the-scientist.com+news%2Fdisplay+war+against+metaphor
I should have included this
References
1. Pasche B. A new strategy in the war on renal cell cancer: hitting multiple targets with limited collateral damage. JAMA 2006; 295: 2537-2538. CrossRef
2. Roberts I, Shakur H, Edwards P, Yates D, Sandercock P. Trauma care research and the war on uncertainty. BMJ 2005; 331: 1094-1096. CrossRef
3. USAF. Intelligence targeting guide. Attachment 7: collateral damage
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.h…
(accessed Jan 4, 2006)..
4. Ashtyani H, Hutter DA. Collateral damage: the effects of obstructive sleep apnea on bed partners. Chest 2003; 124: 780-781. MEDLINE | CrossRef
5. Orwell G. Politics and the English language. Horizon 1946; 13: 252-265
http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-language.txt
(accessed Jan 9, 2006)..
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Affiliations
a. Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
b. German Cochrane Centre, Department of Medical Biometry and Statistics, University Medical Centre Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
I wasn’t saying that PoMo folks typically want to test their ideas and assumptions. Certainly the PoMo freaks whom we’ve been discussing don’t seem to want to do so. I’m not defending PoMo, I generally dislike it. But I admit that there are some calling themselves “Post-Modernist” and I can’t see why, except that they think of themselves as belonging to an era after the Modern, or maybe it’s an academic way to say “really hip, man,” I don’t know. I know of a fellow — an information scientist of kind specializing in things like evolution — who, on the subjects in which he specializes, doesn’t rely on jargon or gibberish (so far as I can discern), seems happy to talk about truth and to have his ideas tested, and talks of tests and so on, and he associates himself with PoMo.
Tetrast,
“I wasn’t saying that PoMo folks typically want to test their ideas and assumptions. Certainly the PoMo freaks whom we’ve been discussing don’t seem to want to do so.”
Agreed. If the testing of assumptions were a key objective one might expect to find a wide spectrum of political positions among PoMo enthusiasts, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead one finds a broad uniformity across disciplines, whether in cultural criticism, art theory, sexual politics, racial identity courses, etc.
Notions of hegemony and ‘imperialism’ are staples of PoMo literature, usually peppered with quasi-Marxist humbug of one kind or another. Patriarchy and women’s rights are other common topics. Though, curiously, criticism is rarely directed at non-Western cultures in which patriarchy is rather more obvious, and where it may involve, say, enforced shrouding, legal inferiority or the stoning of rape victims.
The villain of the piece is almost always a product of Western culture and, coincidentally, something lefties don’t like (or pretend not to like). If a solution is proposed, that solution will generally entail a leftist position of some kind. Given almost every notable purveyor of PoMo “discourse” leans to the left, this is hardly a surprise. And the more overtly postmodern a person’s “discourse” is, the further to the left their politics tends to be.
The problem with these sort of debates is it they rapidly devolve into an ‘us versus them’ situation where ‘them’ is a massively disparate group of thinkers/critics/frauds/whatever you like really, all grouped under a label which is neither carefully defined nor accurately applied. The label in this case being ‘postmodernism’.
The irony is, of course, that the people attacking ‘postmodernists’ for their abuse of scientific terms are performing exactly the same form of abuse on terms such as philosophical and critical ones.
Not that I would want to defend postmodern thinking as I understand it. I tend to agree with the guy who said ‘the virtual ethical and aesthetic abdication of postmodern thought leaves a kind of black stain upon history’. Sokal? Dawkins? No, Guattari.
John,
Heavens, this thing rumbles on. Good-oh.
Yes, you’re right, it’s difficult to keep in focus a movement that covers so much ground, is ill-defined by its proponents, and means quite different things in many areas. (Elsewhere, I’ve used the term ‘postmodern’ as shorthand for products of popular culture in which an overt awareness of their own history and conventions is central. Clearly, that’s not the cause of umbrage here.) I’ve tried, perhaps not entirely successfully, to focus on the extent to which a great deal of postmodern thought appears to be a vehicle for a range of dubious political assertions, rather than a ‘free-standing’ intellectual exercise, as it were.
Thanks for the Guattari quote. Do you have a source? There are quite a few self-defined postmodernists who came to realise their folly, at least in part, and rather late in the game. By which time, a great deal of damage had been done. It’d be interesting to know if Guattari’s objection to PoMo’s “ethical abdication” was based on it being insufficiently leftwing.
Yes, sorry to arrive at the party so late 😉
The Guattari quote is from ‘Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication: An Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg’ in Gary Genosko (ed.) _The Guattari Reader_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 116.
Guattari was certainly never a ‘self-defined postmodernist’. His published view of postmodernism was unflinchingly vituperative. This is exactly the sort of problem I wished to highlight with my ‘us and them’ comment.
It is undeniable that Guattari’s work is deployed (often very badly) by self-avowed postmodernists, however that is hardly his fault. If this makes him a postmodernist by association, then I guess that makes Heisenberg one as well if the same people who misinterpret Guattari are misinterpreting the Uncertainty Principle.
You write
‘It’d be interesting to know if Guattari’s objection to PoMo’s “ethical abdication” was based on it being insufficiently leftwing.’
I think that this is broadly correct. Guattari’s problem with postmodernism, as he sees it, is that it hinders any practical leftist political engagement, simply hiding behind obfuscation and concepts such as ‘the end of metanarratives’ which encourage passivity and thereby emasculate left wing politics. This argument should be familiar to you: it is substantially the same as Sokal’s justification for pulling his hoax.
My point here is not to rehabilitate Guattari in the eyes of you and your commentators, merely to demonstrate that the way in which you appear to be using the term ‘postmodernism’ is subsuming widely disparate elements under one banner.
I am also highly dubious of your conflation of ‘postmodernism’ with left wing or pseudo-Marxist politics. This is only true of some of the people you name check. I won’t take up much more of your time, but will point out that there is an entire industry churning out articles on how Derrida and deconstruction is fatally compromised politically via its association with the purportedly Nazi philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the participation of thinkers such as Paul de Man. I don’t believe any of it myself, but it does go to show that things are not as black and white as you appear to depict them.
Incidentally, Derrida was never a postmodernist either.
John,
Thanks for the Guattari source; much appreciated.
“This argument should be familiar to you: it is substantially the same as Sokal’s justification for pulling his hoax.”
Agreed. Though I’m not sure how Guattari reconciles this with some of his own earlier writing, and I doubt Sokal would have much time for Guattari, his work, or even his politics.
“Incidentally, Derrida was never a postmodernist either.”
Derrida is generally, if loosely, regarded as a postmodernist figure; for instance, see below:
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html
Insofar as he peddled obfuscation, self-contradiction and anti-rationalism – and favoured dodgy leftist politics – Derrida fitted the broad postmodern template quite well, I think. And the point remains that most of the key – and almost all of the current – purveyors of postmodern ideology are of the political left, and often the far left. This is not, I think, a coincidence.
Epistemic relativism, competing “power narratives” and associated ideas suit a range of doubtful leftist assertions. On this basis, one can argue that all cultures are equal (except our own), that gender is entirely a social construction, that “Western ways of knowing” are imperialist endeavours, etc. This cluster of assertions has serious disabling effects, both for critical thought and for politics. The acceptance of these ideas tends to make it rather difficult to say why Western democracies are preferable to Islamist theocracies, or why reason is preferable to religious hysteria, or why the education of women is preferable to the denial and suppression of such. Some of these problems are outlined in the pieces linked below:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/the_perils_of_m.html
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/blunting_the_se.html
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/alguardian_the_.html
See also this article, especially the later sections:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/art_bollocks_re.html
Well StuckRecord “My wife often tells me off when I scoff at catwalk fashion shows”
I’ve got a link for you from last year:
http://www.style.com/fashionshows/collections/F2006RTW/complete/slideshow/PUGH?loop=0&event=show1425&designer=design_house996&trend=&slideshowId=slideshow32355&iphoto=6&play=false&cnt=20
Label on the link:
Fall 2006 Ready-to-Wear
Gareth Pugh – Runway
Challenge her to find a half dozen people “ready to wear” the monstrosity pictured. That picutre (7) is IMHO the “worst”, but 10 and 11 make me giggle every time I see them.
Still time to comment? I seem to have stumbled, rather late, onto a somewhat morose intellectual orgy.
Just a couple of points, if I may. First, if one is going to argue, David, or rather assert, that pomo is a Bad Thing because it’s left-wing, that really does shut down further enquiry. Maybe you didn’t mean it that way; maybe it’s just the finishing touch after your attempted demolition; but it’s out of place, at least without further elaboration.
I haven’t read Guertin, and my plate is full at the moment, so I can’t tell if she’s being deliberately obfuscatory or not. But, speaking as a moderate postmodernist, I think there’s a large baby–in fact, several babies–and a very small amount of bathwater being pitched out here. There’s nothing obfuscatory, for example, about Foucault: he writes, in fact, with admirable clarity. I’ve read Judith Butler on Foucault: she makes sense. Richard Rorty is a master of clear, non-obfuscatory writing.
That doesn’t mean I believe that “anything goes” (Feyerband); but I’ll go on distrusting metanarratives until someone–or some God–grants me divine revelation, or at least a good keek at the ding an sich. Let me end with a look at this comment:
If, to quote Foucault, “reason is the ultimate language of madness”, and if, as Jean-Francois Lyotard argued, notions of truth and clarity are synonymous with “prisons and prohibitions,” then adherents of this view are free to believe whatever they wish to believe, regardless of contrary evidence or logical errors, and regardless of the practical fallout of such beliefs.
This is laughably false, and about as far away from what serious postmodernists believe as the hapless Social Text editors were from what scientists think when they were strung up by Sokal. (I think the latter did us a service, frankly. Trying to explore the margins of relatively new thinking will be bound to produce sloppiness and outright charlatanism on occasion. That stuff needs to be exposed. So does the use of jargon in a dick-waving contest.)
The difference between fiction and serious scholarly investigation lies in tests of empirical adequacy, tests which any ethical scholar willingly undergoes. While empirical adequacy itself is socially conditioned–witness the observation three or four decades back that those who believed that intelligence is genetic and race-based tend to be white males, while those who argued for less culturally-bound concepts of intelligence than IQ tests were not–it is still something to which we agree to submit. We’ll go to the primary sources, we’ll make observations, we’ll test hypotheses: not because some Truth will be revealed, but because we have agreed on a set of rules so that what we do is mutually intelligible–in other words, so we can talk to each other.
Sokal thinks (we’ve corresponded) that scientific investigation progresses, and we drill down deeper into our knowledge of reality. My own position is instrumentalist: scientists build models, they don’t seek after the Truth. I think knowledge gets broader with investigation, with periodic paradigm shifts (Kuhn) or ruptures (Foucault), but deeper? If I can be pardoned for referring to Deleuze and Guattari for a moment, that’s tree-thinking. Science is productive, but to claim for it an intimate, privileged relationship with “objective reality,” whatever the heck that is, is just another way of saying you’re right because God told you so.
Anyway, enough for now. Other than the categorical dismissiveness encountered here, this was a pretty good discussion.
“but because we have agreed on a set of rules so that what we do is mutually intelligible–in other words, so we can talk to each other.”
Sorry. Make that “but because we have agreed on a set of rules so that what we do is mutually intelligible–in other words, so we can talk to each other and work together.”
Dr Dawg,
Welcome aboard. And, yes, it seems this thread refuses to die, gracefully or otherwise.
“First, if one is going to argue, David, or rather assert, that pomo is a Bad Thing because it’s left-wing, that really does shut down further enquiry.”
I don’t believe I’ve done that. I’ve pointed out that PoMo theorists and enthusiasts tend to have leftwing politics of various kinds, often an extreme and fanciful kind. I’ve also shown how many PoMo ideas lend themselves to supposedly leftist causes, e.g. the social construction of gender, queer theory, identity politics, the “intellectual imperialism” of “Western ways of knowing”, etc. (It’s true, of course, that others on the left and elsewhere would take exception with, say, cultural equivalence for very good reasons, as it undermines real progress in, for instance, the status of women and minorities.) But it is, I think, significant that almost all of the current architects and proponents of what is loosely termed PoMo are of the political left, often pointedly so. I’ve offered possible explanations as to why this might be the case, here and elsewhere.
“I haven’t read Guertin, and my plate is full at the moment, so I can’t tell if she’s being deliberately obfuscatory or not.”
She is, quite clearly. Perhaps more to the point, she appears to be unhinged and loose among us.
“There’s nothing obfuscatory, for example, about Foucault…”
Well, he’s much more comprehensible than, say, Derrida. But that’s beside the point. I haven’t suggested otherwise. I take exception to Foucault not because he was difficult to fathom, but because he was so often tendentious, innacurate or absurd.
Regarding the passage you quoted, I haven’t suggested that you personally, or anyone else, necessarily believes “anything goes”. (Though one notes that several prominent PoMo figures, among them Derrida and Fish, have used epistemic “playfulness” to disregard the contradictions of their own ideas, or to deny past assertions and their unflattering implications, which rather favours my point.)
I’ve suggested that an acceptance of many PoMo ideas, or at least the popular understanding of them, can make it extremely difficult to say in consistent terms why, for instance, Western secular democracy is preferable to Islamic theocracy, or totalitarianism or whatever. Or why the education of women is a good thing to encourage, and the stoning of gay people is not. Notions of cultural equivalence and epistemic relativism have, directly or otherwise, informed popular ideas of being ‘non-judgmental’ and deferential towards other cultural or religious values, however obnoxious and incompatible they might be. This equivalence, ostensibly in the name of fairness, is an intellectually dubious position, and one that raises practical, real world problems.
I’m glad you’ve found the discussion rewarding, at least in part.
Thank you for the welcome, David. This seems like an agreeable place to wrestle.
I agree that many in the PoMo camp (if such a camp exists) are on the Left politically. But there appears to be a suggestion–and if I’m wrong, I’ll stand corrected–that these left politics are the real agenda, with PoMo being a kind of front for them. If this is, at least in part, what you are asserting, you might wish to confirm that, because, if so, I have more to say on the subject.
You slip rather too easily into phrases like “cultural equivalence.” My previous background was in literature, but I’m currently a returning student in anthropology, and I’m not aware of any serious commentator who argues such a thing as “cultural equivalence.” Do you mean “cultural relativism,” not to be confused (as it so often is) with “moral relativism?” “Identity politics,” as you must know, are not blindly accepted by many of us on the Left. Personally, I think they are founded on essentialism, and, pushed to the extreme, are a strategic blunder.
Certainly, though, PoMo writers investigate such matters as the social construction of gender–and why not? Indeed, it’s matters such as the social construction of gender that give rise to PoMo theorizing in the first place. More traditional notions of gender simply don’t hold water.
If this is the place for it, I would be interested in your specific critique of Foucault. If you’re going to use words like “tendentious” and “absurd,” it seems to me that some actual examples would be helpful. (If you’ve already provided these elsewhere, my apologies. I just discovered this site, and have not had time for more than a cursory looking-around.)
You appear to be concerned–and I’m not criticizing you for this–about the practical consequences of all of this theorizing. It appears to you to be subversive, which it may well be, but that doesn’t mean leaving the field open to Osama. Being open to other cultures and epistemes doesn’t mean acceptance of invidious practices in those cultures or in our own. I think that we need to approach other cultures in a more sophisticated way than we in the West have tended to do, but that doesn’t mean blind acceptance of all things and all acts, by ourselves or by others. Otherwise, we would have accepted German Nazism as the legitimate cultural expression of a Nordic tribe, and explained away their genocidal and expansionist bent as “culturally equivalent.” No one that I have read has taken that kind of extreme view of cultural relativism.
Dr Dawg,
I wouldn’t think of it as wrestling, but you’re welcome all the same.
“But there appears to be a suggestion… that these left politics are the real agenda, with PoMo being a kind of front for them.”
Given the near-saturation prevalence of leftist politics of some kind among enthusiasts of PoMo, and given how frequently PoMo ideas are used to advance some form of collectivist, anti-bourgeois or anti-capitalist position, that’s a fair point to raise, I think. This isn’t to suggest that all practitioners of PoMo (however we define it) are using their theorising simply as a front for leftwing politics or some pseudo-radicalism; merely that many, perhaps most, appear to be doing something like that to varying degrees. And this doesn’t seem to happen quite so much in departments of engineering or mathematics. One need only note how frequently, even habitually, capitalism is critiqued or “problematised” in PoMo student papers to entertain the possibility of political feather fluffing and ideological lockstep.
Added to that, there are an unusually high number of charlatans – among them Carolyn Guertin – whose “work” has no obvious purpose except as a platform to voice a range of positions associated with one part of the political spectrum. (I realise that one might unearth something Guertin has written that isn’t entirely ridiculous, but it’s difficult to take her theorising in good faith given just how much of it is absurd, and just how absurd it is.) This also raises the issue of systemic dysfunction and bias in parts of the humanities. Guertin may be cartoonish, but she’s far from unique in her flummery. One has to ask how such evident inadequacy and deception passed peer review. Her thesis, such as it is, was presumably read, proof-read, evaluated, etc. Perhaps this was done by people who share Guertin’s shortcomings, her deceitfulness, or perhaps her politics.
“I’m not aware of any serious commentator who argues such a thing as ‘cultural equivalence’.”
I suggest you read the Guardian, specifically the comments of Madeleine Bunting, Seumas Milne, Martin Jacques, et al. There are plenty of specific examples found throughout this site. (See links earlier in thread.) Their arguments on a range of issues are clearly based on the assumption of some equivalence between cultures – selectively applied, of course – and, in Bunting’s case, between scientific methodology and religious belief. Though you might well say they aren’t serious commentators, and I wouldn’t argue with that.
“’Identity politics’, as you must know, are not blindly accepted by many of us on the Left.”
Agreed, and I haven’t suggested otherwise. I should point out that there are some voices on the left whose commentary I very much respect. (See blogroll and archive for examples.) But the fact that, for instance, Ophelia Benson and Norman Geras have written some precise rebuttals of cultural equivalence or identity politics doesn’t alter the fact that those ideas are effectively products of leftwing thought and are championed (chiefly) by people of the left. And I should point out that those on the left whose thinking I do respect have many of their most heated and protracted arguments with other people on the left who do advance such things.
“If this is the place for it, I would be interested in your specific critique of Foucault.”
It isn’t, insofar as I don’t have time to itemise and organise my objections right now. I will, I think, return to Foucault and his vanities at a later date. I have touched briefly on his flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism in the post below:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/04/foucault_and_th.html
“You appear to be concerned – and I’m not criticizing you for this – about the practical consequences of all of this theorizing. It appears to you to be subversive, which it may well be…”
Well, I’m concerned by a number of things. Much of the fashionable theorising is a distraction from affecting positive change, or, quite often, it’s an obstacle to such. And much of it is fatuous posturing for insecure neo-Marxist ideologues pretending to be educators or bearers of wisdom. Hence the gratuitously opaque prose, which seems as much a stylistic affectation as a technical necessity. If you want to improve the world or reduce poverty or child mortality or whatever, fretting over “penile imperialism” or the social construction of reality doesn’t seem to achieve very much beyond one’s immediate circle.
When practical consequences are discernible, they’re often regressive – as with the cultivation of tribal identity politics, the curtailment of free speech, pretentious deference to backwards or incompatible belief systems, etc. And then there’s a more general blunting of the critical senses due to the acceptance of tendentious, heavily politicised jargon and a tendency to political lockstep. Much of the jargon, even in art or literary studies, is loaded with quasi-Marxist assumptions and points of reference, thus students are steered towards thinking in quasi-Marxist terms. I’m concerned because a huge amount of theorising actually disables necessary or desirable change and inhibits real progress, whether in terms of sexual politics in the developing world, or child mortality or whatever. See below, which touches on this:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/05/vagina_warriors.html
See also these:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/the_perils_of_m.html
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/blunting_the_se.html
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/art_bollocks_re.html
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/04/on_pomo_contrad.html
So, I hope you see my objections aren’t entirely the result of my being pure evil.
“If you want to improve the world or reduce poverty or child mortality or whatever, fretting over “penile imperialism” or the social construction of reality doesn’t seem to achieve very much beyond one’s immediate circle.”
Well, maybe so, but I don’t see that coloured, charmed, strange atomic particle theorizing cures leprosy, so there we are. Does all intellectual endeavour have to be practically useful? Isn’t that a fairly outmoded Stalinoid notion?
On Foucault, I’m less interested in his momentary political dalliances than with his interesting and, I believe, quite valuable contribution to discourse theory. And, as an example of PoMo lucidity, his “History of Sexuality” is pretty good.
My bottom line is that I’m with you on intellectual sloppiness, but I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You preempted me on the newspaper columnists–I don’t look to such sources for serious intellectual insight–but the whole notion of “cultural equivalence,” which I notice you wield quite a bit, is somewhat of a straw man, with respect.
I’d actually wandered around enough on your site to have encountered and read the three articles that you reference. And, for the record, I disagree on a number of points, but the idea of “pure evil” should be confined to Islamist atrocities that have no root causes, and similar metaphysical eruptions, n’est-ce pas? 🙂
Dr Dawg,
“Well, maybe so, but I don’t see that coloured, charmed, strange atomic particle theorizing cures leprosy, so there we are.”
But particle physicists rarely, if ever, make great claims with regard to their work about “social justice” or “resisting capitalist hegemony” or whatever. PoMo theorists do, very often, and about some rather unlikely things. In certain hands almost anything is political, apparently. Hence the comments about fluffing feathers and political narcissism. In short, I’d suggest there’s an awful lot of bathwater and a very small baby.
“The whole notion of ‘cultural equivalence’, which I notice you wield quite a bit, is somewhat of a straw man, with respect.”
I disagree. I don’t know how closely you follow the UK leftist press or browse popular leftish websites, but variations of these ideas are actually quite commonplace, albeit tacitly assumed in many cases. These assumptions are perhaps most obvious in discussions about multiculturalism and Islamist intemperance.
I have to be brief as I’m needed elsewhere, but feel free to rummage around and argue with the locals. I ask only that you play nicely. Well, fairly nicely.
“I think that we need to approach other cultures in a more sophisticated way than we in the West have tended to do”
Edward Said’ is responsible for one of the greatest myths of the age. The West has for many years absorbed ideas and influences from wherever it has had contact. This stands in stark contrast to the attitude of some other cultures. Consider our attitude to Chinese ideas compared to the reverse. Were the first western eyes opened to Buddha and Confuscious in the 1960s? As a metric, consider Said’s original country and consider how few western books get translated into Arabic compared with how many foreign books get translated into European languages.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/117328.html
> “coloured, charmed, strange atomic particle theorizing cures leprosy”
SQUIDs# help cure cancer. They are the main part of an MRI machine.
#Superconducting Quantum Interference Device
> Does all intellectual endeavour have to be practically useful?
It should be if it’s funded by extortion from a society.
Anon:
What myth is Said being accused of perpetrating? The imposition of the West on the Rest doesn’t mean that the former eschews intellectual plunder. Did Said say the opposite?
A pity, by the way, the the underground in Dar-ul-Islam is peddling Hayek. Rorty would be a better read, and more relevant.
AC1:
Your last sentence is worth framing. I’m sure that when you hear the word “culture” you reach for a blunt instrument, revolvers now being illegal and all.
“> Does all intellectual endeavour have to be practically useful?
It should be if it’s funded by extortion from a society.
Posted by: AntiCitizenOne”
Well isn’t that just a bourgeoisie patriarchal inference from a…
WAHAHAHA sorry, I tried. I really did.
I would suggest that Anon uses a link to Reason not to highlight the particular fact that Hayek is not published there, as to source the general fact that little is translated there:
“five times more books are translated annually into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic”
Source UN report (link seems broken)
http://www.undp.org.sa/Reports/AHDR%202003%20-%20English.pdf
I would welcome Rorty being translated into Arabic. Do YOU object to Hayek being translated?
While on the subject of Said, here is a right wing nutjob (I say that to save Dr Dawg th etrouble) expounding on Orientalism
http://roger-scruton.blogspot.com/2007/06/glory-of-west-is-that-life-is-open-book.html
TDK:
Many thanks for the link! No, of course I don’t object to Hayek being translated. I was just grumbling. My top ten for the Arab world would probably differ from yours. But top ten, hundred, thousand there must be. Part of our present nightmare is this kind of insularity. (Are current Arab novelists and poets getting translated and circulated here, by the way? I simply ask.)
Scruton’s mini-essay presents arguments that I’ve seen before. But no one has ever seriously claimed that the West doesn’t appropriate elements from other cultures and civilizations. I’m not aware that Said made any such assertion. His thesis was primarily about the way we are conditioned to view the Other, and (while I will, when I have time, look for Ibn Warraq’s book) I think it still holds water.
When I hear culture I think of yogurt.
Most people who use the word culture mean something very different. They mean a body of work produced by people who look down on the genuine cultural work being paid for by vast majorities of people.
AntiCitizenOne,
I suppose the issue is whether being interested in culture necessarily entails state subsidy. I’d like to think I’m not a total heathen, but very few of my cultural interests involve the tax payer footing the bill.
Are museums and libraries not funded by the taxpayer?
“Are museums and libraries not funded by the taxpayer?”
Yes, but visiting subsidised libraries and museums doesn’t define being cultured. I’m not averse to libraries and museums – I visited one over the weekend – but the role they play in my cultural life is extremely limited. It’ll be interesting to see how the more general role of such venues changes over time. The notion of art galleries, certainly contemporary galleries, as sole repositories of aesthetic excellence is already somewhat doubtful.
No disagreement there. I guess I was getting at the larger issue, taxpayer subsidies for “high” culture. That would include museums and galleries, but also BBC Radio 3 and various granting agencies. Conservatives have a hard time with this, but leaving such things to the market makes my blood run cold. Surely culture in this sense is, or should be, a collective resource.
“Surely culture in this sense is, or should be, a collective resource.”
Broadly speaking, I don’t have a sharply defined opinion on this. I don’t rail against the local museum’s £4m overhaul, for instance, though the place now has the obligatory PC whiff about it. What I object to, and have grumbled about elsewhere, is the increasing public subsidy of arts “projects” that are aesthetically vacuous and overtly political – guess which way – and in all the worst possible senses. That lefties can get publicly-funded grants to essentially peddle their political beliefs – and do so really badly – is shameful. It’s parasitic flimflam.
Scott Burgess has written about this at some length:
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2007/03/the_extraordina.html
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2007/03/exclusive_inclu.html
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2007/03/the_gravy_train.html
By the way, I notice you’ve added this site to your blogroll under the heading “Intelligence on the Right.” I’m flattered, of course. But I’m not entirely sure how I qualify as being “on the right.” I’m just not on the left. Unless I’m in denial and am actually – as previously suggested – composed of pure evil.
Aw, I’ve read that sort of stuff before–dissing a granting agency by looking at titles of projects is a favourite pastime of journalists over here with time on their hands. But this reminds me of where I came in: mocking without depth tends to annoy me (whereas, of course, mocking *with* depth is a pleasure to read). Check out the actual projects, not just the titles, and see if they’re really such a waste of time and money. [Declaration: I was a grants officer once, and routinely became annoyed by some of the uninformed jibber-jabber in the popular press. This brings it all back.]
On the blogroll thing, one should never be binary about these things, but, reading around the site, I assumed (and that’s a risk, admittedly)that your politics were conservative. If I’m wrong, I’ll be pleased to open a new category for you. 🙂
Never mind, I fixed it. 🙂
If you browse Scott’s site he does more than just look at the project titles, and the point about political bias remains. To the best of my knowledge there’s no comparable rightwing equivalent to this subsidised posturing. I seriously doubt the Arts Council and associated bodies would go for that, and nor should they.
I’m sure many of the recipients imagine themselves principled and righteous. But I fail to see much principle in taking the bourgeois dime to badmouth the bourgeois people whose bourgeois jobs and bourgeois taxes make this kind of horseshit possible.
“Never mind, I fixed it.”
Thanks, I do feel I should have my own tribe.
> Are museums and libraries %%% funded by the taxpayer?
Yes sadly. I’d prefer them to be funded by the people that visit them and enjoy their contents.
> Surely culture in this sense is, or should be, a collective resource.
Collectives form themselves.
You mean coercion rather than collective.
It’s like the difference between an estate of people who live near each other and a prison.
On 2003-10-19, Alan Charles Kors wrote the following, which I consider to be a valid criticism of left-of-the-isle postmodernism:
“The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one’s breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry “caste.” In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either “poverty” or “consumerism.” In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry “alienation.” In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry “oppression.” In a society of boundless private charity, they cry “avarice.” In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the “exploitation” of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry “injustice.” In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like “liberty” in quotation marks when these refer to the West.”
Haha, omg, you guys are so bitter. PoMo texts are jokes, and you guys don’t get it: “that banana on the floor is a serious safety violation– someone could slip!” How do you expect to follow this stuff when you read it without context? With views of science that date back centuries. You can draw the similar (mistaken) conclusions from Quine (re:truth). Excellent vocabulary, but as frankly mistaken in your interpretations of the philosophies you deride, which is, yes, ironic.
Link,
Yes, of course, that must be it. We just don’t get the joke. How knuckleheaded we must be. But perhaps you’d be good enough to explain how, exactly, the above critique is “mistaken”, and, in doing so, perhaps you could explain exactly what “context” would make Ms Guertin’s handiwork lucid and meaningful?
http://www.vacuumwoman.com/About/Main/Curly.doc
Would be interested to hear your thoughts about this.
I wonder how effective it might be to show postmodernists the foolishness of their total rejection of objectivity and the reality of the antithesis by writing about objectivity, truth, Jesus, the cross, people, justice, and reality in a prose or style which some might call a postmodern rhythm. By rejecting all rules, standards, objective truth, they set themselves up to “win” any argument and shame anyone who would disagree with them, but by rejecting objectivity, standards, and truth, their victorious claims are reduced to absurd gibberish, and the sane person can use postmodern rhetorical poetry to persuade people that by denying the reality of the antithesis, they are proving the reality of the antithesis, since the antithesis of the statement, “There exists a real antithesis” is “There is no antithesis.”
Then again, you can just rebuke them for their rebellious godlessness and go on your merry way.
Incidentally, this is also why most of the crap that some call “modern art” totally sucks.
Postmodernist theory is what the modern world produces instead of poetry.
I was writing something that required a few lines of feminist gobbledygook – I googled ‘feminism’ and ‘quantum’ (two unlikely bedfellows) just to see what mischief I could make., and lo and behold this woman and her dissertation pops up.
I had no idea such insanity existed – insanity because it’s taken seriously by all ‘evils of patriarchy’ females locked tight in their ‘gender is a social construct’ box.
I fear for womankind.
THROW SOME FRUIT AT THIS
I laughed aloud while wading through this. A relative of mine participated in the design of the F-14 engine AND overall craft and he is never this obtuse, if ever obtuse at all as what follows here. If ever a woman needed less cats, following is a stor…
What is postmodern scholarship for?
One of my favorite new bloggers is David Thompson. In a post called Peddling Stupidity, Mr Thompson considers the writings of radical cyber-feminist Carolyn Guertin.
Guertins work speaks for itself; Thompson provides examples.
Wi…
Peddling Stupidity – The Postmodern Scholarship Of A ‘Radical Cyber-feminist’
I’m often amazed at the trash and dressed-up, empty thought processes that are passed off as scholarship on Western university campuses and force fed to young vulnerable minds. Take for example the “work” (as in reeeeeal piece of work) by the psychobab…