"The very nature of post-modernism is that anything written about post-modernism is problematised and naturally then is to be deconstructed and found to be an arbitrary, relativistic construction of meaning. This ultimately seems to imply an inherent meaninglessness in postmodern debate, although in becoming meaningless itself it also seeks to bring down with it the constructed meanings of everything else.
To write about postmodernism is also to be prepared to be totally wrong and infinitely vulnerable. But there is freedom here too, to see meaning fractionated into new forms.
An illustration of erudite meaninglessness that can appear in postmodernism (and elsewhere) comes from this opening to Tilton and la Tournier's essay entitled "Feminism, subcapitalist theory and the cultural paradigm of expression, in which they write describe "contexts of meaninglessness":
""Sexual identity is fundamentally impossible," says Bataille. A number of narratives concerning textual precultural theory may be found. In the works of Burroughs, a predominant concept is the concept of textual reality. In a sense, the within/without distinction prevalent in Burroughs's Port of Saints is also evident in The Soft Machine. The subject is interpolated into a semiotic postdeconstructivist theory that includes consciousness as a whole....It could be said that if preconceptualist discourse holds, we have to choose between dialectic capitalism and posttextual appropriation. Lyotard promotes the use of the cultural paradigm of expression to modify and analyse class."
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
The problem here is that as erudite as this sounds, it is a fictitious essay that was randomly generated by a computer programmed with post-modern phraseologies. Thus it can been how easily meaning is constructed through interpretation. W we may also recognized in here an inherent meaningless to much similar postmodern jargonesque text that gets thrown out under the guise of real debate...
Few people are able to retain a high level of consciousness in postmodern thinking because to do essentially rots away held meaning. If this is not paired with a strength of will for constructing new meaning that goes beyond the corrosive power of postmodernism, then an individual can be left rather lost and confused, but perhaps content that he/she has avoided subscribing to false meanings.
Personally, I'm not sure of the history or origins of post-modern thinking except that I gather it is loose and involves many who don't agree and the so-called key figures of post-modernism themselves usually question or deny being labeled as anything to do with what others have called post-modernism. So its bloody hard to even get started with postmodernism, let alone possible connections between postmodernism and other fields of inquiry...
So the essential value, in a pragmatic sense, of postmodernism is that it can help us to develop a functional realism by questioning available information and knowledge, instead of just swallowing it. There is however a huge emptiness in postmodernism, just as there is a huge emptiness in existentialism - at the end of the day, what is left? What is to be done? If human knowledge and knowing is so entirely constructed, then what are we to do? And this is where I think postmodernism struggles and largely fails to emerge from its own self-reflective prison and here is where we need other methods of thinking and action...
So be warned in discussing postmodernism about the dangers of getting lost in a recursive, rather than discursive, paradigm. There are labyrinths of mirrors which one can wander for hours, days, even lifetimes. We need to do more than that."
***
Dawkins Review of Intellectual Impostures
Addendum: aka "Postmodernism Disrobed"
"Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content...
No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?...
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively)
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
You don’t have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve).
... But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when someone punctures the established bag of wind."
***
A short while back, someone asked if I knew about the Sokal affair (though he didn't name it as such; I think the moral of the story was supposed to be that the humanities are fluff). I recognised what he was referring to, and in turn asked if he knew about the SCIgen/WMSCI scandal (though I didn't name it as such either).
It turns out that there are also the Videa abstracts and Bogdanov Affair.
So the moral of the story is something about peer review. Though I do agree with a lesser version of the original claim: post-modernism is incoherent.
