Postmodern Theory and the radical left?

shit ive just sussed out that pomo must be a short for post modern. Dang if it takes me all of three pages to work out that, chances of getting maths, logic or poststructuralist theory understood is an almost impossible task!!!

Yeah, I mean, Chomsky probably has no time for concepts like "abstract labor" or "commodity fetishism" either, which he probably regards as some obfuscatory mysticism. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a lot of academic work in the humanities seems to employ obscure language for its own sake, but on the other hand, I don't agree with the Chomsky notion that all complex ideas can be reduced to the Reader's Digest version, and if they can't, they're bullshit.

Huh. I never said anything about systems or syllogisms (I think we've been over Aristotelian logic for about a 100 years now, BTW). The only thing I'm asking for is that if someone tries to make a case in written or spoken word, whatever it is, they should try to make it a good case by stating what is relevant, how it is relevant (if it's not obvious), and what the evidence (not necessarily empirical) is. If they're not sure or clear about something, they should state that clearly. Scientists, mathematicians and logicians routinely point out unpolished or incomplete parts in their own work. Libcom posters don't seem to have a problem with it either. Marx certainly didn't have a problem with it, at least in his unpublished work.

Now, using unnecessary mathematical jargon in a way that differs from its standard usage (so much that a trained mathematician can't make any sense of it),

- while not explaining how it is relevant (or providing explanations that, again, don't make any sense, and being unable to justify them further when asked),

- while not admitting clearly that mathematics is being used in a non-mathematical, perhaps purely figurative or poetic way, and thus without any claim to express analytical truths,

- all the while doing that in what could be described as an arrogant, "this is really obvious and you, dear literary criticism freshman, are an idiot for not getting it" way (see Lacan),

- and eventually being unable to justify that use and instead throwing a "WHITE MALE SCIENTIFIC FASCISM" hissy fit, Social Text-style,

is not a good way of making a case.

Yeah, it doesn't help that it looks a bit like "porno".

I think the Exit people around the late Robert Kurz, and particularly Roswitha Scholz, are grasping at trying to do this, but at the moment it's basically just the totally underwhelming tendency to take the findings of post-structuralism and re-phrase them in Marxian language.

I think a major failing of so many streams emanating from the Frankfurt School is this total unwillingness to do actual empirical research, rather than relying on secondary literature produced by others. Foucault already called out the original Frankfurt School on this failing.

Yeah, I gave up on the Todd May book half-way through for this. Apparently the other attempts at this "marriage" are even worse. The problem appears to be that certain academics got the idea that post-Berlin wall & post-Seattle, anarchism was potentially trendy, or at least not as shop-soiled as Marxism (in academia) and that post-structuralism was already trendy amongst the lit crit and cult stud crowd, so why not combine the two for extra cred points?

The only problem is that none of them seem to have noticed a certain essential feature of both anarchism and post-structuralism (possibly one of the few things they both genuinely share?) - i.e. that neither of them have a nicely centralised theoretical reference point or "core" that can be neatly spliced with each other. Hence all such attempts begin by creating both an anarchist and a post-structuralist strawman, so the two can then be mated together.

Given the decentred nature of both fields, the only way I can see influences passing between the two is through an analogue of horizontal gene transfer (to abuse yet another scientific term ) - unfortunately for academics, as this process would (presumably) only happen through the encounters between activists engaged in collectivities of struggle, of one knd or another. Thus the chance of being in charge of a anarchist-pomo breeding programme and claiming intellectual parentage (always good on an academic and publishing CV) seems scant. Back to trying to re-invent Lenin, I guess...

Any thoughts on the Sokal affair?

RTFT

It amounted to little more than a demonstration that a non-peer reviewed journal doesn't peer review its articles.

I understand Intelltual Imposters is a decent book. And there are lots of criticisms that can be made about much left wing theory, as is happening on this thread, but the Sokal affair it ridiculous.

He managed to get an article published in a journal that openly stated it did not get submissions per reviewed. Whoop de doo.

The sokal affair is less of a meaninglful blow to post-modernists or cultural theory than Jan Hendrik Schön, or the Bogdanov affair is to physics. (But nobody talks about the latter two in the pub.)

Post-anarchism

Jesus. That is such a load of crap. I gave a paper at what was basically a post-anarchist conference where Saul Newman spoke. I was practically shouting at him and some of the other speakers. One person claimed that "anarchists don't operate using and analysis of class, they think in terms of power". I told him that he was "erasing" the experiences of thousands of people. Also at the conference a south korean friend/comrade gave a brilliant paper (that went down like a lead balloon) and later someone gave a paper on the dangers of Euro-centrism in left wing discourse. My friend, she said that capitalism started in Europe and now is global so Euro-centrism is not totally crazy, especially in historical analysis. Which got a reply which brushed it off. So then she gave the example of development in South Korea. And then the person replied 'yes, I think its very important that voices like yours are listened to'. FUCK OFF YOU CONDESCENDING FUCK!!!

Language

I can;t believe that I'm linking to the Newstatesman but this is relevant.

Except that Social Text's response to the Sokal hoax did not involve accusations of "WHITE MALE SCIENTIFIC FASCISM". That's a projection of your own based on whatever personal resentments are driving you here... which is a bad way of making a case supposedly in defence of rationalist evidence-based discourse, N.B.

Yeah, they just accused him of being "unethical" or whatever. Anyway, you are right that Social Text is not the culprit here. However, overreactions of "postmodernists" to supposedly "scientistic" criticism are not rare.

I wanted to come back to this, as I think its an important point. Certainly, like Bakunin said, we need to fight against the tyranny of 'experts'. And that needs to be a part of our organisational praxis in whatever struggles we're involved in. But at the same time we need to recognise that practically any body of theory dense and opaque enough to resist the attempts of most working class people to access it, can be used in this way.

In that sense, some of the negative associations that people have with post-structuralist thinkers is that it happens to be the currently fashionable club for the self-appointed academic/intellectual elite to bash people over the head with and shut down discussion. But those power-plays are a product of the "will-to-power" of a certain decompositional class fragment of would-be intermediators/controllers. Sooner or later the fashion will pass to another area via the "changing of the guard", as a new generation of that fragment struggle for dominance. Some of my German comrades tell me that these days Critical Theory is now the dominant philo trend amongst the young left and university crowd (I stand to be corrected on that). But the useability of the underlying concepts themselves still are a matter for individual judgement, apart from the "hipster principle" - i.e. that something currently popular must be uncool. (I would mention Nietzsche and the you-know-whos, but that would be invoking the spectre of Godwin).

Stiil the point remains, that even if I personally don't get on with Critical Theory, and if it is currently growing popular to the point of verging on the hegemonic in certain quarters (and hence, by Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap, being mostly used to sell crap ideas and crapper programmes), does not mean that I automatically draw the conclusion that because I can't see anything useful in it, therefore no one can (be allowed to).

"Critical Theory" in the original sense of "Frankfurt School", or "Critical Theory" in the sense of "everything that literature students are required to read" (Birminham School, post-structuralism, cultural studies, critical race theory, queer theory, etc.)?

If the latter, yeah, probably true for most humanities departments, but that's not any different in America. If the former, this must be a very recent development.

And as for actual philosophy departments, my understanding is that they're just as grounded in analytical philosophy as Anglo-American philosophy departments (but I'm not a philosophy student, so I can't say for sure).

Seems to me to be almost like resting on a reassertion of the arguements one would find in AJ Ayers Language, Truth, and Logic whereby language is rendered meaningful if and only if it expresses a proposition that is either analytically true (true by definition) or is open to being empirically verified.

Since mathematics deals in the domain of analytic truths and Sokals attack on the misuse of maths of some of those Post-Structuralist Theorists seems to discredit at the very least the mathematical premises in and of themselves, then i guess it depends on the degree of how essential such mathematical premises are to the overall arguments by said theorists would determine how strong the conclusions are that they have drawn.

It seems so far in this thread that nobody is really contesting the misuse of maths that has been done by such theorists, so i guess it comes down to how much the non-math derived arguments stand on themselves as to how seriously such theories ought to be taken (if we accept the kinda arguments that the likes of ayer would make).

the worst offshoot of postmodernism are those annoying pseudo-radical students you meet in courses at uni especially in literature studies, history or sociology who probably have read in total 100 pages by Derrida, Butler, Foucault and Lyotard but are on a mission to tell you that you have to "de-centralize" (= to de-totaliarize) historiography e.g. by seeing some musings about a buckle on a rococo dress as equally important and equally true than e.g. in-depth research about the decline of the German petty-bourgeoisie and its influence on anti-semitism in 19th century Germany (these "fellow" students made me a part-time admirer of Terry Eagleton)

probably the second worst by-product of post-modernism are the anti-post-modernist articles of the German sociologist (and semi-Stalinist) Werner Seppmann who thinks, that he can explain all that with a few quotations from Lukacs's The Destruction of Reason: ...

p.s.: in a talk Seppmann gave on "post-modernism as a bourgeois ideology" around 15 years ago, someone asked him, if his criticism also applies to (Judith) Butler ... his reply was: Butler? Haven't read him

I think analytic philosophy must be the only thing that goes against the 'hipster principle' in that it is unpopular and is very uncool haha...

?

If the current crop of critical theory textbooks (in English though) is anything to go by, then decidedly the latter.

Adventures of an analytic philosophy student # 1

Analytic Philospher enters coffee shop and surveys the scene illuminated by the lights of Apple Laptops... Discussion (or should it be discourse) is emanating all around.

AP trys to enter conversation

" Hey guys i just noticed that you all have apple laptops - thats really cool you aint in with those windows lot, I've got my Linux based laptop with me - wanna see?

Hipster group "?..... Deluze....... Fugazi.......Zizek..... Marx....."

AP (face a little red) " oh marx...... just did this very interesting thing on Cohen....."

Hipster group "......?....... dialectics.....irony....."

AP (getting a little anxious) .... "ohhhhh uhm.... dialectics can you explain that to me?..... how can you cojoin p and not p - we don't get taught that in my department??......"

Hipster group ".....?..... witty remark.... injoke conjoined with laughter of assent of the group..... existentialism ..... phenomenology"

AP (hands starting to shake somewhat with the nervousness"ohh uhm phenomenology right?? Is that like phenomenalism?..... that makes me think of locke, berkley and hume - didn't deluze start off on examing hume right?....." (teeth chattering somewhat)

Hipster Group " FUCK OFF"

AP .... "oh uhm ok sorry to bother you all, just thought you might be interested in ehm frege and stuff - he challenged hurssells views on maths you know....."

AP surveys the rest of the coffee place and to his delight sees a group of people with long hair and laptops with a GNOME GNU!

Emanating from the group are words about " NOT OR AND NAND" - Delight!!!

AP "Hey what you say sounds very interesting, i love truth tables!! what do y'all study"

New Group " Computer Science... you?

AP " Analytic Philosophy!!!!"

New Group " Well fuck off then"

AP fucks off into the sunset.

The former. tbf my source is a young post-grad lecturing down in Cork on Frankfurt school style Critical theory, so he's probably biased. But pretty recent, yes, according to him, anyway.

I've read some Foucault, some Butler, etc., and I think postmodernism has some valuable insights on a few different topics. However, I think David Harvey provides a really valuable critique of postmodernism in The Condition of Postmodernity. He gives it it's dues, but he also takes it to task on things like the idea that we cannot have any totalizing theory because everything is fragmented. He shows, quite convincingly, I think, how postmodernism is a cultural form of late capitalism. He does not say that postmodernism is completely valueless, but that, certainly, we should reject a lot of what is there because it actually detracts from movements for social and political equality and liberty. It is also a masterfully written book: very clear and very concise.

It is a good book. But it is in dialogue with Frederic Jameson's critique of Jean-François Lyotard's (and Baudrillard's) proposition of postmodernity. That particular proposition is not particularly part of the work of many post-structuralist theorists, rather their stuff has been lumped into the sack of "postmodernism" retrospectively (usually, like kittens, all the better to drown them together - see Callinicos, for e.g.). "Postmodernism" in the proper noun sense is (ironically) a meta-narrative that seeks not only to determine the character of the contemporary phase of capitalist society, but also what antagonistic strategies are now possible (and impossible) in the "changed circumstances". Which turns out, in Lyotard's and Baudrillard's case to be "not a lot". Which is why everybody and his or her dog have attacked them for being reactionary quietists (rightly, imo).

It is ironically a meta-narrative, isn't it? I hadn't really thought of it that way, but of course it is. Still, in trying to determine the character of post-68 capitalism, do we not find many postmodern scholars speaking against meta-narratives and against totalizing ideas in general? To the point that we cannot even name capitalism at all? Along with Lyotard and Baudrillard, we can also find Foucault speaking of such fragmentation. And while some might argue that Foucault did believe in meta-narratives because he wrote his many histories, the fact that he is largely silent on economic systems (at least to my knowledge) makes postmodernism look all the more like a cultural form of late capitalism. Now, I think there is much to be taken from the thought of these scholars (I love Foucault on the complexity of causality, for example), but to completely abandon meta-narrative seems insane. This is what you said in the end of your post, Ocelot, so I suppose I'm arguing that this idea permeates postmodernism more deeply than you say it does.

On another note, I'm not so certain that most of the insights of postmodernism didn't already exist within modernism, but in a more nuanced way since modernism allowed for fragmentation and meta-narrative simultaneously. I suppose postmodernism protects against the overzealous totalizing ideas that sometimes plagued modernism, but I think it's fair to say that postmodernism then got overzealous going in the other direction.

Thank you. This always annoyed me, but I always felt like a crank for pointing that out, since it's really a minor issue. I hate how some Marxists say "postmodernist" as a synonym for "French theorists."

My first exposure to the term ("postmodernism") was an anthology of cyberpunk science fiction and related critical writing, so I always associated it with an attempt at periodization within the arts and their social context, then when I got "political" a few years later, I noticed Marxists used it as a term of abuse, and I was all confused like, "can't I read William Gibson and dig John Zorn's music but still be like a leftist and shit?!"

I was of the understanding that it was, for the Frankfurst School, an act of 'self-reflectivity', by which I mean an awareness that prevaling power relations distort means of communication and thus the 'pure' or 'authentic' expression of one's subjectivity should try and transcend naturalised language (for, following this argument, it would only constrain your actual subjectivity). Though, this in turn - as you suggest - would perhaps prompt self-reflection on behalf of the reader. This, I think, is a tremendously weak notion (undermined not least by the fact critical theory can and has been articulated in a straight-forward manner).

For me, Critical Theory captures the partial truths of post-structuralism without (necessarily at least, for Adorno fell susceptible to such) falling off the cliff into relativism and rejecting transcendent claims altogether.

Also, I don't think (though I could be wrong, I don't read too much of this stuff) very few post-structuralists are suspect to wholesale solipsism (i.e. that nothing material can be confirmed but oneself); they don't deny a reality beyond the one phenomenally presented to them through the sense data they cognitise, they just deny being able to neutrally access that reality.

On another note, I detest the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, it is crudely generalising and reproduces mutual misunderstanding and separation. They are both incredibly rich traditions.

I'm not buying whatever Adorno is selling when it comes to writing style and clarity. It's my understanding that he didn't want to be understood anyway, as per Said in Representations of the Intellectual. After reading Dialectic of Enlightenment, I tend to agree.

Yes, sorry about that. I feel a little bit embarrassed now.
I should also have done a basic search on Libcom as there are plenty of references here too:
http://libcom.org/search/apachesolr_search/Sokal%20affair.

As georgestapleton mentions Lacan earlier in the thread, I just wondered what posters here think of Richard Webster's The Cult of Lacan. Freud, Lacan and the Mirror Stage?

Jacques Lacan.

Diagrams by Jacques Lacan.

Yeah i think that distinction sucks - im doing philosophy in an avowedly analytic department at the moment - i was gutted when they got rid of the hegel and marx modules when they were downsizing - but thats life and austerity and all that. If i get good enough marks i hope to do my masters in continental philosophy in a couple of years...

That's a shame though Marx seems to transcend (sub-)disciplines. When I was in a class last year committed to three terms of unpicking Rawls' A Theory of Jusitce Marx was surprisingly pertinent, Rawls and much liberal egalitarian analytic philosophy seem to take him relatively seriously; well, insofar as you can within their epistemology.

Recently I have likened to the Cambridge 'contextualist school' of political theory, who embrace genealogy and conceptual history as their methodology of choice while maintaining some normative base and analytic crispness. Raymond Geuss there draws heavily from critical theory, yet has a background in analytic philosophy. Best of analytic and continental philosophy to me.