Postmodernism - Weiye Loh on Diigo

Apr

28

2012

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

www.philosophynow.org/...th_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

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Postmodernism Foucault Philosophy Modernism Spectacle Reality Reality TV

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
18 more annotation(s)...
- Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
- Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.
- The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).
- Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.
- Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money.
- The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.
- A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity.
- If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state.
- The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal
- Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters.
- A triteness, a shallowness dominates all.
- In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
- To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them.
- Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
- whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety
- Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble.
- pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent.
- pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists

Mar

28

2012

3:AM Magazine » Bad Faith VIII

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 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.

www.3ammagazine.com/...bad-faith-viii

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Postmodernism

Mar

14

2012

Sokal and Lynch on First Principles - NYTimes.com

We can’t reasonably defend our trust in science just by doing more science in the hope of persuading those who aren’t already on board. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give reasons for our first principles, including the epistemic principles of science. Of course we can. The hard question is what sort of reasons we can give.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...defending-science-an-exchange

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Science Epistemology Rationality Religion Postmodernism Sokal

the core disagreements between, to use your example, fundamentalist Christians and the rest of us are ultimately over epistemic principles.
The trouble is not that fundamentalist Christians reject our core epistemic principles; on the contrary, they accept them. The trouble is that they supplement the ordinary epistemic principles that we all adopt in everyday life — the ones that we would use, for instance, when serving on jury duty — with additional principles like “This particular book always tells the infallible truth.”
6 more annotation(s)...
- As the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, you can doubt induction or observation all day long, but you’ll still end up trusting them later that night. As he put it, it is just part of our “natural instincts” to trust our senses most of the time. That is how we are built.
- First, the fact that most folks believe some principle doesn’t make it true, as Hume would have been the first to point out. The relevant epistemic principles are fundamental precisely because any attempt to justify them is circular. (Think of trying to give a logical argument for trusting logic, or basic inference patterns like modus ponens).[1] That problem doesn’t go away just because most people will accept certain principles.
- The second reason we can’t rest content with the fact that some principles are widely shared is that some debates are over the priority of principles. Some people reject the idea that scientific reasoning should always trump more traditional methods of knowledge. Thus, believers in creationism typically don’t deny induction and abduction (coming up with the best explanation of the data) full stop. Rather they deny that these principles have priority everywhere.
- ALAN SOKAL: Yes, it’s hard to imagine what an ab initio justification of logical principles like modus ponens would look like. But I guess that I have never gotten much worked up over this problem: all of us who are interested in discussing more serious problems (be they in philosophy, science, mathematics, politics or anything else) have no choice but to use modus ponens (and a lot of other things).
- If creationists deny that abduction from the fossil record is the best method to learn about the distant past, what method do they recommend as superior? Reading the Bible? It seems to me that the relative value of these two methods can be readily understood by using our ordinary general epistemic principles — and fundamentalist Christians would approve perfectly the structure of the reasoning, if we were dealing with a nonreligious document (for instance, Thomas Jefferson’s detailed account of events that allegedly took place in Philadelphia in 19,000 B.C.) or the sacred writings of another religion (like the Bhagavad-Gita). The problem, it seems to me, is not that we really have any disagreement in our fundamental epistemic principles; it is simply that fundamentalist Christians have special epistemic principles that in fact conflict with their general principles (once one takes into account certain relevant observational data), but they don’t see that fact (perhaps they are not aware of all the relevant data) and perhaps they don’t want to see it even when the relevant data are brought to their attention.
- . One of the deepest threats to rationality is from those who use skeptical arguments as dialectical tools for what I call “leveling-down” purposes. There is a long history of this in Western philosophy and theology, and not just with advocates of religion. Postmodernists use these arguments too (as Professor Sokal knows well). The basic thought is: “The methods [of science say, or whatever] can’t be shown to be reliable in a noncircular fashion [insert skeptical argument]. Therefore the methods of science are no more rational than any other.” They are all on a level.

Mar

7

2012

Our Kind of Truth - Ian Buruma - Project Syndicate

It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.
But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

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Journalism Polarisation Fragmentation Politics Bias Postmodernism

Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners.

But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.
It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.
1 more annotation(s)...
- But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

Feb

22

2012

Club Troppo » George Bush, Bruno Latour and the end of postmodernism

or discussion: one of the far right’s greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were.

Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly Karl Rove) disparaging what the aide calls “the reality-based community”:

“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’

The quote may not be correct, and it may be that the aide was actually making the case for action over endless analysis; it isn’t as clear as Suskind paints it. But the whole quote had a post-modern ring to it, and it set me thinking about post-modernism and the right.

clubtroppo.com.au/...r-and-the-end-of-postmodernism

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Postmodernism Science Modernism Rightwing Politics Reality

First, the attempt by some on the US right to push creation science into schools is a pretty textbook implementation of the postmodern philosophy of science. Specifically, it is …

… an implementation of the views of the post-modern philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend about replacing science with democracy. Feyerabend was not much of a believer in seeking “the truth”; rather, he wanted to let a thousand flowers bloom. Here’s his Wikipedia entry:

“Feyerabend defended the idea that science should be separated from the state in the same way that religion and state are separated in a modern secular society. He envisioned a ‘free society’ in which ‘all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centres of power’. For example, parents should be able to determine the ideological context of their children’s education, instead of having limited options because of scientific standards. According to Feyerabend, science should also be completely subjected to democratic control: not only should the subjects that are investigated by scientists be determined by popular election, scientific assumptions and conclusions should also be supervised by committees of lay people. He thought that citizens should use their own principles when making decisions about these matters. In his opinion, the idea that decisions should be ‘rationalistic’ is elitist, since this assumes that philosophers or scientists are in a position to determine the criteria by which people in general should make their decisions.”

Determining scientific assumptions and conclusions by committees of ordinary people, of course, is just what the proponents of creation science are currently fighting for.
It was the climate science debate that drew the attention of Bruno Latour, a philosopher frequently associated with post-modernism, although he has preferred to be seen as an opponent of the very idea of modernity. Latour was one of those analysts of science so neatly skewered by Alan Sokal in 1996 in the famous “Sokal hoax“.

In 2004, Latour wrote an essay, Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? Not much noticed at the time, it’s now finally available online. And it’s well worth a read, in part because Latour can actually write well when he wants to.

He started by noting that US Republicans strategists such as Frank Luntz had adopted a conscious strategy of stressing that the scientific debate on climate change was “not settled”. Latour was now unsettled to find that people with whom he disagreed were using the same attitude to truth that he himself had spent years promoting.
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- “Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show ‘the lack of scientiﬁc certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a ‘primary issue’. But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? …
  
  “… While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.
  
  “Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this ﬁeld known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good? Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them? Should we apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts … Isn’t this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? But what does it mean when this lack of sure ground is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against the things we cherish?…

Dec

18

2011

An ode to the many evolved virtues of human semen: Scientific American

while such soupy postmodernist rhetoric may still have its place in certain scholarly circles, in dealing with something as clinically important as unprotected sex among vulnerable populations, a scientific understanding of these people’s motivations is essential before any intervention of their high-risk behaviors can even begin to occur.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

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Sex Seman Psychobiology Postmodernism Science

women’s bodies can detect “foreign” semen that differs from their recurrent sexual partner’s signature semen, an evolved system that, Gallup believes, often leads to unsuccessful pregnancies because it signals a disinvested male partner who is not as likely to provide for the offspring; women who had unprotected sex with their ex-partners—and therefore were getting regularly inseminated—experience more significant depression on breaking up than those who were not as regularly exposed to their ex’s semen (and they also go on the “rebound” faster in seeking new sexual partners, which presumably would help fix their semen-deprived depression). And the list goes on.

Oct

23

2011

Timothy Ferris: The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer | Epicenter | Wired.com

Being an intellectual had more to do with fashioning fresh ideas than with finding fresh facts.

www.wired.com/...1

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Intellectual Engineering C P Snow Postmodernism

it became fashionable in intellectual circles to assert that there was no such thing as a fact, or at least not an objective fact. Instead, many intellectuals maintained, facts depend on the perspective from which are adduced.
Reform-minded intellectuals found the low-on-facts, high-on-ideas diet well suited to formulating the socially prescriptive systems that came to be called ideologies. The beauty of being an ideologue was (and is) that the real world with all its imperfections could be criticized by comparing it, not to what had actually happened or is happening, but to one’s utopian visions of future perfection. As perfection exists neither in human society nor anywhere else in the material universe, the ideologues were obliged to settle into postures of sustained indignation. “Blind resentment of things as they were was thereby given principle, reason, and eschatological force, and directed to definite political goals,” as the sociologist Daniel Bell observed.

Rationally Speaking: Engineers vs intellectuals? How Timothy Ferris gets it spectacularly wrong

Timothy Ferris is a writer over at Wired magazine, and his byline boasts that he has been “called the best science writer in the English language” as well as “the best science writer of his generation.” Perhaps, though such virtuosity was hardly on display in a recent piece Ferris penned (okay, keyboarded) entitled “The world of the intellectual vs the world of the engineer.” It is a quasi incoherent rant about the evils of intellectualisms and the virtues of applied science. Ferris writes, I would argue as an intellectual, in one of the most intellectual of contemporary publications, about how the battle between intellectualism and science-engineering has been waged since the beginning of the printing press. The results are in - science/engineering won hands down - time to close the curtain on intellectualism.

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...intellectuals-how-timothy.html

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Intellectual Engineering C P Snow Postmodernism

Ferris engages in such a stereotypical piece of anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter (the sociologist who authored the classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life) could have used him as a poster boy. Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Indeed, Hofstadter even identified the precise category of anti-intellectualism to which Ferris’ rant belongs: instrumentalism, or the idea that only practical knowledge matters and should be cultivated. In America, the attitude traces its roots to the robber barons of the 19th century, as exemplified by the attitude of Andrew Carnegie about classical studies: a waste of “precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past.” Of course this is the same Andrew Carnegie who established a university in Pittsburgh, donated money to public libraries, and founded the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York City — all bastions of intellectualism of a high caliber.
True, postmodern critics of science as a way of knowing do make fools of themselves, and they should rightly be chastised for that (though, let’s also remember plenty of instances in which scientists have said really silly things, as in the case of the astronomer who in 1957 predicted with confidence that humanity will never be able to put an artificial satellite in orbit around earth — a few months later Sputnik went up). But postmodern critique of power structures, both within science and in society at large, is spot on. Only a naive outsider could possibly imagine that the hall of science departments — where I have spent a good chunk of my life — are idyllic havens devoted to the search for truth. Yes, truth is being sought, but petty vendettas, systematic gender and ethnic discrimination, power plays, vanity plays, and other wasteful or destructive behaviors go on all the time, just as in any other human social activity.
1 more annotation(s)...
- it is only in the misguided minds of anti-intellectuals like you that there would be a war going on between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, and it is your destructive type of anti-intellectualism that risks undermining our best efforts to build a better society. To put it as Kant (another giant of intellectualism) did, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.” And he wasn’t talking just about scientific theories.

Oct

5

2011

Skepticblog » Faux (Fox) Pas

www.skepticblog.org/...l-warming-but-it-doesnt-matter

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Climate Science Climate Change Reality Denial Postmodernism

New York Times Magazine columnist Ron Suskind interviewed Karl Rove on Oct. 17, 2004:

he said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Paul Krugman. As he puts it in his recent column:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.”
1 more annotation(s)...
- In the meantime, I proudly wear a badge which proclaims my allegiance to the “reality-based community”.

Sep

12

2011

Has postmodernist design eaten itself? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

With its deceptive surfaces and furniture that doesn't do what it's supposed to, postmodernism is not just the backdrop to but a metaphor for unbridled capitalism, where a plump balance sheet conceals all manner of sins and where marble-effect formica hides chipboard. But was postmodernism really so bad?

www.guardian.co.uk/...t-design-v-and-a-retrospective

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Postmodernism Design

according to the standard reading, postmodernism was fickle and ironic, obsessed with style for its own sake. Where modernism was about high-minded notions such as essence and truth to materials, perhaps even a social agenda, postmodernism was about surfaces and signs. As Fredric Jameson put it in his brilliant Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, "it is like the transition from precious metals to the credit card".
revivalism seems to be one of the permanent legacies of postmodernism. Retro has become a perpetual condition. You can see it in ultra-conservative magazine design and referential fashion statements. If chameleon style-shifters such as Madonna and Grace Jones are postmodernists, then so is Lady Gaga. What is Apple if not neo-modernism, a revival of the minimalism preached by Dieter Rams and the Ulm design school in the 1960s? And the image economy (if that really is a Memphis legacy) is now so advanced that designers publish computer-generated images of work that is not only skin-deep, but doesn't even exist. In architecture, meanwhile, PoMo didn't die so much as find itself exported to the new bastions of turbo-capitalism: mirrored glass (and the lack of financial transparency that goes with it) abounds in Moscow, while the towers with the funny crowns migrated to Dubai and Shanghai. The V&A ends the story in 1990 (well, shows have to end somewhere) but postmodernism is proving a difficult habit to kick.

Sep

5

2011

Lee Kuan Yew denies venom « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

Who has the final word on what is Islam? Why should the state get involved? If the state shouldn’t get involved in defining Islam and taking sides in the pro- and anti- Ahmadiyah interpretations, why should our state get involved in taking sides on the question of radical jihadist Islam?

yawningbread.wordpress.com/...lee-kuan-yew-denies-venom

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Religion Extremism Islam Singapore Postmodernism

It may seem very obvious to the uncritical that Islam is what moderates make of it, but why should moderates have the final word on what constitutes Islam?
As food for thought, consider this: In Indonesia, there are Muslim groups that are highly offended by the Ahmadiyah sect. They want it proscribed by law. In the meantime, these groups engage in acts of violence and intimidation against the Ahmadiyah. Yet government officials tend to accept that the anti-Ahmadiyah groups more or less represent mainstream Islamic thinking, even if a bit too aggressively, and in their administrative actions lean towards them and against Ahmadis. The result has been a series of highly discriminatory state actions against the sect.

Who has the final word on what is Islam? Why should the state get involved? If the state shouldn’t get involved in defining Islam and taking sides in the pro- and anti- Ahmadiyah interpretations, why should our state get involved in taking sides on the question of radical jihadist Islam?
4 more annotation(s)...
- Ah, but one side resorts to violence, you may say. Fine, deal with the violence, but stay nothing about its ideology. Don’t take sides in the interpretation of the religion. Don’t use words like “radicals who have hijacked Islam” (vide Lee Kuan Yew’s latest statement) because doing so immediately says that their interpretation of Islam is wrong.
- By the same token, why does the Singapore state tacitly acknowledge that conservative Christianity (in particular, the anti-gay, anti-nudity, sex-phobic positions) represents Christianity?
- The government tends to pick and choose what versions of religions to acknowledge as legitimate when they go about their “multi-religious” business. They need to do this because in many areas of social policy, they have to find some kind of happy medium (call it what you will: centre of gravity or the lowest common denominator) as anchor for policy. This magic point on the graph cannot be found if the reference points remain nebulous; one has to fix the reference points, before one can compute the centre of gravity or lowest common denominator.
- . We shouldn’t be running around trying to find lowest common denominators and coming up with solutions like: If four in five religions (as determined by the state) find homosexuality wrong, therefore the state should find homosexuality wrong. If three in five religions say wives must obey their husbands, therefore the law should provide fewer rights for married women versus married men.
  
  Of course the government is careful never to frame it quite like that; however, each time they say “Singapore is conservative”, or make some reference to “widespread” opinion, they are in effect making reference to religious beliefs — because these views stem from there.

Jun

23

2011

San Francisco Sentinel » Blog Archives » Fundamentalists get a big one - Irrepressible San Francisco gay youth organizer nails himself to The Cross

www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=134842

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Homosexuality Postmodernism Queer Theory Social Construction Religion

Michael wrote of “people scrambling for a home amidst the labels,” and in another he hoped for the day when “men who love women wave flags for identification.”

It all sounded very much like the Michael I knew at XY, a young man who was fascinated by queer theory — namely, the idea that sexual and gender identities are culturally constructed rather than biologically fixed — and who dreamed of a world without labels like “straight” and “gay,” which he deemed restrictive and designed to “segment and persecute,” as he argued in a 1998 issue of XY. Though he conceded back then that it was important “to stay unified under a ‘Gay’ political umbrella” until equality for gays and lesbians had been achieved, Michael preferred to label himself queer.

As Ben and I reminisced, I couldn’t help wondering if Michael’s new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension of what he believed back then — that “gay” is a limiting category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. “A radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren’t always as different as they might seem,” he said, adding that they’re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a monopoly on the truth.
I told Michael about a recent conversation I had with our former boss at XY, Peter Ian Cummings, who surprised me by wondering aloud if Michael was ever truly gay. “In retrospect, more than you or me or anyone else who worked at the magazine, his sexuality almost felt more theoretical than real to me,” Peter told me. “At a very young age, he had all these very well thought out theories about identity and sexuality. Maybe this gay or queer identity that fascinated him, and that he had taken on, wasn’t really true for him. It doesn’t explain why he says such ridiculous things about gay people now, but maybe, just maybe, he’s not in denial about his own sexuality.”
1 more annotation(s)...
- It doesn’t get better if you’re gay? Michael would have punched me in the mouth if I said that back when we worked together. I never would have, of course, because it’s a lie. But also dishonest, in retrospect, was our claim in a 1999 issue of XY that “everyone is happier” after coming out. Michael insisted that we include that line, but it was wishful thinking, and ex-gays are living proof of it.

Jun

11

2011

The Grid TO | Dawn of a new gay

When Carl Wittman, the American writer and activist, wrote A Gay Manifesto in 1970, it galvanized the gay liberation movement. The document was a ballsy critique of homophobia in North America, but also an unrepentant plea for courage and change within the community itself, proclaiming, “A large part of our oppression would end if we would stop putting ourselves and our pride down.”
Forty years after the Manifesto and the infamous Stonewall Riots in New York City, a new generation of twentysomething urban gays—my generation—has the freedom to live exactly the way we want. We have our university degrees, homes and careers. In Toronto, we’ve abandoned the Church Wellesley Village. We’re tattooed and pierced and at the helm of billion-dollar industries like fashion and television. We vacation with our boyfriends in fabulously rustic country homes that belong to our parents, who don’t mind us coming to stay as a couple. Hell, we even marry our boyfriends, if we choose to, on rooftops overlooking Queen West. Our sexual orientation is merely secondary to our place in society. We don’t need to categorize or define ourselves as gay, and who we sleep with—mostly men and, hey, sometimes women—isn’t even much of a topic of conversation anymore. The efforts of Wittman and his peers produced a whole new type of gay. Say hello to the post-modern homo. The post-mo, if you will.

www.thegridto.com/...dawn-of-a-new-gay

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Homosexuality Postmodernism Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Feminism

May

29

2011

Feminism 2.0 « Guardian Watch

Modern feminists want to maintain their feminine power in the domestic sphere, to moralise about the sex industry and women’s behaviours and choices, whilst also demanding full equal rights in work and public life.

graunwatch.wordpress.com/...feminism-2-0

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Feminism Postmodernism

The problem with feminism, even, or especially the hippy, libertarian feminism that Suzanne espouses, is it is not libertarian at all. It is imposing a morality and a judgement on women just as any conservative puritan might. And it does so in a contradictory and hypocritical way.

Also. Being called a prostitute is something that many women- sex workers and their allies, for example, would not take as an insult. They would take it as an insult that a feminist woman should consider it to be insulting. And being a ‘pimp’ or an employer of prostitutes is also not something that necessarily has to be evil and wrong. Incidentally, many sex workers are self-employed.

Apr

22

2011

Skepticblog » Reality Check

skepticblog.org/...reality-check

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Science Deconstruction Postmodernism PHilosophy Social Construction Peer Review

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

—Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, on “Real Time With Bill Maher”, Feb. 4, 2011

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, author

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

—Carl Sagan
In recent years, both philosophers and science deniers (such as creationists) have repeatedly attacked the objectivity of science and scientists. Creationists claim that scientists are big frauds, deceived by a mass delusion about evolution
8 more annotation(s)...
- On the other hand, philosophers and cultural critics have attacked science as well. Some philosophers have argued that outside reality is an illusion, and we can only know what we personally experience. If we do not perceive it, reality does not exist.
- More recently, the fad for deconstructionism in the non-scientific realms of academia argues that all our ideas are so culturally based and biased by our human prejudices that we cannot decide what is “real” or “objective.” This argumentation has gone in circles within philosophy for centuries. Philosophers of science, in particular, are fond of telling scientists what they should do, often without finding out what scientists actually do.
- For the most part, scientists themselves have largely ignored these debates swirling around their activities. Rather than agonize over what method they should be using, or whether they are being truly objective, most scientists just get to work and produce results.
- Although some working scientists are familiar with the debates among philosophers of science, most are not, and it doesn’t seem to reduce their scientific productivity a bit.
- How do we know what scientists do, and what science tells us, is real or not? Is it all an illusion? Is it just the product of cultural expectations? There are many good arguments against the idealist/solipsist position or the deconstructionist ideas as well, but the simplest ones are these:
- BECAUSE IT WORKS. Science produces tangible results upon which other science and technology can be built–and our entire modern civilization is a product of this. If scientific ideas were merely based on a cultural or philosophical illusions, we would not have the huge advances in technology or medicine or computers or transportation or any of many other modern benefits that science provides us. In particular, we would all still be living short, brutish and nasty lives and dying of diseases or infections that have largely been conquered by modern medicine. As Carl Sagan put it, “If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.”
- BECAUSE SCIENCE IS SELF-POLICING. Individual scientists can be biased or deluded, or fudge their data, or cherry-pick what they want to believe. As the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” But in a true scientific community, the process of peer-review largely screens out the garbage from the good stuff. Peer-review is not perfect, and there are exceptions to this rule, such as papers which are not as carefully scrutinized as they should be. But unlike almost any other field of human endeavor, good science has a strict procedure of subjecting one’s ideas to the critiques of others with expertise in the topic. This prevents widespread publication of ideas or data until they have passed through this strict gantlet. By and large it works very well. Even if questionable ideas make it through the process of publication, the scientific community will continue to test and re-examine and try to replicate important ideas, often for years afterward, so once an idea has stood the test of time it is very likely to be a real observation about the world.
- BECAUSE SCIENCE TELLS US “INCONVENIENT TRUTHS.” If the process of science were all a delusion based on our biases and preconceptions and wishes, it would not give us answers that we don’t like or agree with. Yet scientists often discover things that go against our belief systems, but they must put aside their favorite ideas and face this reality. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth (and us) are not in the center of the universe, the idea wasn’t accepted by the Church or the world in general—but it was true. Everyone except a handful of religious nuts and the uneducated now look at the sun “rising” and “setting” and accept the counterintuitive notion that it is the earth turning instead. When Darwin showed that life had evolved and that we are all closely related to other living things, not specially created, it offended many people (and still does)—but its truth was soon acknowledged by the entire scientific community and nearly all educated Westerners who weren’t religiously biased, even before Darwin died. As the web cartoon puts it: “Science: if you ain’t pissing people off, you ain’t doin’ it right”.

Apr

13

2011

DenialDepot

We are not afraid to be called climate "deniers". In fact we embrace it as medal of honor bestowed on us by our alarmist foes. Galileo was a Denier. It is not an insult. I call this blog "Denier Depot" for that reason.

Welcome to my climate science blog.

I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.

We stand unimpressed by "textbooks", "peer review journals" and so-called "facts". There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can't grasp anything as certain as a fact.

Nothing is settled and we should question everything. The debate is NOT over Gore! When so-called "experts" in their "peer reviewed journals" say one thing, we dare the impossible and find imaginative ways to believe something else entirely.

denialdepot.blogspot.com

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Climate Science Denial Skepticism Blog Peer Review Academic Research Postmodernism Facts

Mar

5

2011

Is climate denialism postmodern? | Grist

www.grist.org/...s-climate-denialism-postmodern

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Postmodernism Climate Science Denial Politics Liberal Conservative

in a post about the larger significance of the right's climate denialism, I said this: "Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate." In a New York Times Magazine piece last weekend, Judith Warner argued something similar: that the right's denialism is a dangerous extension of the left's academic postmodernism of the '80s and '90s.
Science journalist Chris Mooney disagrees. He argues that "climate change deniers do not look, behave, or sound postmodern in any meaningful sense of the term."
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- I think both Warner and Mooney are right, but in different ways.
- What is a "postmodernist"? One definition is simple: someone who subscribes to the academic theory of that name. There's significant and important variation among postmodernists, of course, but in one way or another, they all argue that knowledge is socially constructed. Science, they say, is just another social practice or "discourse," not a privileged way of accessing Reality. Postmodernism, at least in its Derridian form, is an extreme form of relativism, which says that truth (empirical, moral, or both) is not fixed, eternal, and objective, but inextricably culture-bound and subjective.
- in that sense, no, obviously most climate skeptics are not postmodernists. Most people who haven't been corrupted by academic philosophy or hallucinogenic drugs aren't. Most are what philosophy snobs call "naive realists" -- in fact, most people probably don't think about empirical or metaphysical theories at all!
- Let's distinguish between what I would call intellectual postmodernists and practicing postmodernists. The former believe that all knowledge is relative to culture; the latter behave as though all knowledge is relative to culture. Those manifest quite differently.
- The right -- not just on climate but on matters ranging from evolution to Obama's birth certificate -- rejects, in practice, the notion that there are empirical standards or practices of inquiry that transcend ideology, tribe, or personality. That's why they are so aggressive with charges of "bias." What they mean by that is that mainstream scientific, academic, and media institutions, while falsely claiming to be objective or nonideological, are in fact of the liberal tribe.
- Mooney asks:
  
  [M]any of these dissenting "skeptic" scientists of course have agendas of their own, rivalries with scientists in the "mainstream," and so on. What on earth makes them so trustworthy, so objective?
- Conservatives do not go to these scientists because they think they are "more objective." They go to them because they affirm conservative beliefs. They are the scientists of their tribe. They are, as Mooney writes, "their scientists." The left gets their scientists, the right gets theirs. The left gets their experts, the right gets theirs. The left gets its news, the right gets theirs. The left gets their reality, the right gets theirs.
- if you ask a Tea Partier if the non-existence of climate change is "objectively true," he'll say yes. He will use the language of disinterested inquiry and evidence, of objective truth, because in this particular political struggle that language confers advantage. But make no mistake, for him, denying climate change is what John Austin called an "illocutionary act" -- it's a reaffirmation of his affiliation with and loyalty to his tribe. In asserting the right's shibboleths, he is expressing his iden
- this is what postmodernism looks like. In practice, postmodernism doesn't mean a bunch of academics in berets giving lectures on postmodernism. In practice, it means competing tribes, each with their own authorities and facts, each with their own reality, settling their differences the only way differences can be settled in the absence of universal standards of evidence and reason -- through brute propaganda and, eventually, violence. When I look over the horizon, it looks pretty postmodern to me.

Dec

18

2010

Integrative medicine and the point of credulity -- McLachlan 341 -- bmj.com

www.bmj.com/...bmj.c6979.full

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Medicine Postmodernism Alan Sokal

Dec

13

2010

Skepticblog » The Decline Effect

skepticblog.org/...the-decline-effect

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Science Postmodernism Denial Skepticism

The first group are those with an overly simplistic or naive sense of how science functions. This is a view of science similar to those films created in the 1950s and meant to be watched by students, with the jaunty music playing in the background. This view generally respects science, but has a significant underappreciation for the flaws and complexity of science as a human endeavor. Those with this view are easily scandalized by revelations of the messiness of science.
The second cluster is what I would call scientific skepticism – which combines a respect for science and empiricism as a method (really “the” method) for understanding the natural world, with a deep appreciation for all the myriad ways in which the endeavor of science can go wrong. Scientific skeptics, in fact, seek to formally understand the process of science as a human endeavor with all its flaws. It is therefore often skeptics pointing out phenomena such as publication bias, the placebo effect, the need for rigorous controls and blinding, and the many vagaries of statistical analysis. But at the end of the day, as complex and messy the process of science is, a reliable picture of reality is slowly ground out.
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- The third group, often frustrating to scientific skeptics, are the science-deniers (for lack of a better term). They may take a postmodernist approach to science – science is just one narrative with no special relationship to the truth. Whatever you call it, what the science-deniers in essence do is describe all of the features of science that the skeptics do (sometimes annoyingly pretending that they are pointing these features out to skeptics) but then come to a different conclusion at the end – that science (essentially) does not work.
- this third group – the science deniers – started out in the naive group, and then were so scandalized by the realization that science is a messy human endeavor that the leap right to the nihilistic conclusion that science must therefore be bunk.
- The article by Lehrer falls generally into this third category. He is discussing what has been called “the decline effect” – the fact that effect sizes in scientific studies tend to decrease over time, sometime to nothing.
- This term was first applied to the parapsychological literature, and was in fact proposed as a real phenomena of ESP – that ESP effects literally decline over time. Skeptics have criticized this view as magical thinking and hopelessly naive – Occam’s razor favors the conclusion that it is the flawed measurement of ESP, not ESP itself, that is declining over time.
- Lehrer, however, applies this idea to all of science, not just parapsychology. He writes:
  
  And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
- Lehrer is ultimately referring to aspects of science that skeptics have been pointing out for years (as a way of discerning science from pseudoscience), but Lehrer takes it to the nihilistic conclusion that it is difficult to prove anything, and that ultimately “we still have to choose what to believe.” Bollocks!
- Lehrer is describing the cutting edge or the fringe of science, and then acting as if it applies all the way down to the core. I think the problem is that there is so much scientific knowledge that we take for granted – so much so that we forget it is knowledge that derived from the scientific method, and at one point was not known.
- It is telling that Lehrer uses as his primary examples of the decline effect studies from medicine, psychology, and ecology – areas where the signal to noise ratio is lowest in the sciences, because of the highly variable and complex human element. We don’t see as much of a decline effect in physics, for example, where phenomena are more objective and concrete.
- If the truth itself does not “wear off”, as the headline of Lehrer’s article provocatively states, then what is responsible for this decline effect?
- it is no surprise that effect science in preliminary studies tend to be positive. This can be explained on the basis of experimenter bias – scientists want to find positive results, and initial experiments are often flawed or less than rigorous. It takes time to figure out how to rigorously study a question, and so early studies will tend not to control for all the necessary variables. There is further publication bias in which positive studies tend to be published more than negative studies.
- Further, some preliminary research may be based upon chance observations – a false pattern based upon a quirky cluster of events. If these initial observations are used in the preliminary studies, then the statistical fluke will be carried forward. Later studies are then likely to exhibit a regression to the mean, or a return to more statistically likely results (which is exactly why you shouldn’t use initial data when replicating a result, but should use entirely fresh data – a mistake for which astrologers are infamous).
- skeptics are frequently cautioning against new or preliminary scientific research. Don’t get excited by every new study touted in the lay press, or even by a university’s press release. Most new findings turn out to be wrong. In science, replication is king. Consensus and reliable conclusions are built upon multiple independent lines of evidence, replicated over time, all converging on one conclusion.
- Lehrer does make some good points in his article, but they are points that skeptics are fond of making. In order to have a mature and functional appreciation for the process and findings of science, it is necessary to understand how science works in the real world, as practiced by flawed scientists and scientific institutions. This is the skeptical message.
- But at the same time reliable findings in science are possible, and happen frequently – when results can be replicated and when they fit into the expanding intricate weave of the picture of the natural world being generated by scientific investigation.

Oct

26

2010

Skepticblog » A Post-Modernist Response to Science-Based Medicine

A POST-MODERNIST RESPONSE TO SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE

skepticblog.org/...onse-to-science-based-medicine

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Postmodernism Science Medicine

One blogger, Marya Zilberberg at Healthcare, etc., has written a series of posts responding to what she thinks is our position at Science-based medicine
She is partly responding to this article of mine on SBM (W hat’s the harm) in which I make the point that medicine is a risk vs benefit game. Ethical responsible medical practice involves interventions where there is at least the probability of doing more benefit than harm with proper informed consent, so the patient knows what those chances are. Using scientifically dubious treatments, where there is little or no chance of benefit, especially when they are overhyped, is therefore unethical. And further, the “harm” side of the equation needs to include all forms of harm, not just direct physical harm.
2 more annotation(s)...
- Zilberberg’s response is the typical tu quoque logical fallacy – well, science-based medicine is not all it’s cracked up to be either, so there. She writes:
  
  Now, let’s get on to “proof” in science-based medicine. As you well know, while we do have evidence for efficacy and safety of some modalities, many are grandfathered without any science. Even those that are shown to have acceptable efficacy and safety profiles as mandated by the FDA, are arguably (and many do argue) not all that. There is an important concept in clinical science of heterogeneous response to treatment, HTE, which I have addressed extensively on my blog. I did not make it up, it is very real, and it is this phenomenon that makes it difficult to predict how an individual will respond to a particular intervention. This confounds much of what we think is God’s own word on what is supposed to work in allopathic medicine.
- This is also the fallacy of the perfect solution – since science-based medicine is not perfect, there is no legitimate basis for criticism of any modality.

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