The Atomic Cannon circa 1952. Fired first atomic artillery shell, range 7 miles. 20 were made, none used in battle. More here. Footage of Atomic Cannon in action here. // Great bus stops of the Soviet Union, photographed by Christopher Herwig. Not uniform and dreary, but quirky and bizarre. Though perhaps a little spartan. // Car Park time lapse. Oddly compelling. // Easy… Mind the, er… // First time landing. A little rough at the edges. // The Nintendo Museum. I still use one of these. // Rosie O’Donnell thinks fire melting steel “defies physics.” Steelworkers, welders, and makers of fine cutlery are, understandably, shocked by this news. Thankfully, the people at Popular Mechanics know more than Rosie does. About most things, I’d imagine. // George Monbiot flies, urges others not to. Going on holiday by plane is “morally unacceptable.” Hyperbole and hypocrisy still okay, apparently. // BBC avoids “alienating” its “anti-war” audience by cancelling drama based on real life soldier’s heroism. // Islamists and Communists link arms, regret founding of United States. Islamic Party of Britain would also like to murder gay people. Communist position on this unclear. // Islamist mob says “Our movement is peaceful.” Demands abolition of ‘vice’ or “thousands will retaliate with suicide attacks.” (H/T, B&W) // A bizarre vagina dentata solution to sexual assault. “Worn internally, its hollow interior is lined with 25 razor-sharp teeth.” More here. // Scott Wade, dust artist. Dirty car as canvas. (H/T, OnePlusOneEqualsThree) // Grand Canyon Skywalk. Can support 70 tons and withstand a magnitude 8 earthquake. Glass-bottomed, naturally. More here. // Alan Moore ponders smut, at length. “Our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable.” Discuss. // Yes, the spandex is snug, but clunky retro armour makes a fanboy tingle. // Chuck Norris Action Jeans! “Unique hidden gusset.” Only $19.95. // Panoramic vista from the top of Everest, as seen by roughly 1000 climbers. (Scroll right for full effect.) // Hexagonal clouds at Saturn’s northern pole. Clouds rotate, stay hexagonal. Cause unknown. // Saturn’s south pole is quite strange too. What with the giant Earth-sized vortex. // And finally, a stirring polka, courtesy of Cartman. You’ll feel better for it.

In light of recent posts, and various responses to them, I thought I’d highlight this article, The Philosopher and the Ayatollah, by Wesley Yang. Yang documents Michel Foucault’s dalliance with Islamist fanaticism and his enthusiasm for a “perfectly unified collective will.”

“Foucault never considers the rights of women in Islam until his very last disillusioned missive, in May 1979. When an Iranian woman living in exile in Paris wrote a letter… castigating Foucault for his uncritical support of [the Khomeini revolution], he airily dismissed her claims as anti-Muslim hate-mongering.”

The piece was published a couple of years ago, but it seems relevant and fairly symbolic of what’s been discussed here in the last couple of days. Not least because it conveys Foucault’s contrarian posturing, his bizarre lack of realism, and, above all, his stunted moral sense – attributes shared by many of his PoMo peers at the time and, currently, by much of the political left. As, for instance, when the Socialist Worker published a piece by Loretta Napoleoni, claiming jihadist terrorism is “the new anti-imperialist ideology” and fawning over Musab al-Zarqawi’s “kindness” and “determination.” For other examples of practised unrealism, see here, here, here and here.

Yang’s article is worth reading in full. I’m pretty sure one or two modern parallels can be drawn.

In responding to yesterday’s post on Carolyn Guertin, several commenters noted the contradictions that arise in various strands of PoMo theorising and its political connotations. These contradictions are often summarised as: “All cultures are equal in merit, but the West is uniquely oppressive, imperialist and corrupting. All values are subjective, but sexism, racism and imperialism are definitely evil and must be struggled against.” With these contradictions in mind, I thought I’d post a brief extract from an interview with Stephen Hicks, author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault:

“If all you want to do is destroy, it doesn’t matter to you if the words you use contradict each other… I sometimes think of an analogy here to a stereotypically unscrupulous lawyer who will use any argument, even one that contradicts one he’s already made, if he thinks it will be rhetorically useful in convincing a jury. If one is driven by anti-capitalism, then one knows that attacking technology harms capitalism and one knows that attacking unequal distribution harms capitalism. So who cares if those two arguments contradict each other? You’re harming capitalism!”

As most of the major figures in politicised postmodernism have favoured various forms of collectivism, anti-capitalism and deranged authoritarianism, it’s easy to see how the argument above might apply. Relativistic arguments may be used against the enemy – to flatten hierarchies, for instance – but they’re less readily applied to the collectivist or reactionary politics that PoMo enthusiasts so often advance. (Thus, sceptics among us might suspect the relativism is actually a ruse to further an absolutist agenda.)

If one’s ‘work’ is based on being oppositional – or being seen to be oppositional – against capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism (real or imagined), white male patriarchy, etc, then liberties can, and probably will, be taken. Attempts to fathom truth, or to be consistent, meaningful and accurate, can, and probably will, be dispensed with in order to advance The Great Cause. (Or The Great Oppositional Posture, depending on one’s scepticism.) And it’s worth noting that in Criticism and Social Change, the left-wing theorist, Frank Lentricchia, announced that the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” Achieved, one might suppose, even at the cost of truth.

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.

BT courtesy call goes horribly, horribly wrong. // Tokyoplastic’s bizarre promo video for Zune. Things blink. Buttocks clench. Download here. It’s worth it. // For funksters of a certain age, old school hip-hop flyers. “Jazzy Jay and a Catholic High School Throwdown!” // The golden age of romance comics. An emotional rollercoaster. // Objects of desire: Japanese sake bottles. (H/T, OnePlusOneEqualsThree) // Norman Geras on a lust for ladies’ shoes. “Abd-el-Gowd targeted well-shod women in London, in most cases getting away with a single shoe, but once making off with a pair.” // When girls fight crime. // Spot the subliminal message. // Just in case you missed it. // How to protect your secret identity. Be sure to wait for the end. // 60,000 years of human history, compressed somewhat. // The history of Tupperware. Boxed in Tupperware, naturally. // Magnetic levitation in action. Behold the maglev frog. Works on strawberries, too. // Still a magnificent beast, the SR-71. // Sonic boom made visible. // More visible booming here. // Richard Dawkins on postmodern flummery and the bamboozling of readers. “Clarity would expose a lack of content.” Amen, brother. // Sam Harris talks to evangelist Rick Warren; encounters evasion, incoherence, dishonesty, bonkersdom. (H/T, B&W) // Staggering Hypocrisy at Guardian Shock. “Do you like money?” More here. // Duncan Wilson’s post-it note wallpaper. // Zubbles. Like bubbles, but coloured. // Juggling. Like throwing, but better. // Jean Cocteau gets lively with the Dan Parrish Orchestra, La Toison d’Or. (1929)