In my own thoughts, I go through new arguments showing that postmodernism is incoherent and dangerous on an daily basis. It scares me that much. But here is one more argument.
If there is nothing outside the text (as Derrida once put it), then there is no such thing as some material world event or object or process that any one of our words actually refers to. The process of communication during which we get the meaning of someone else's speech or article is all happening inside of an inescapable network of words and in the end, all the words can refer to is each other. There is no "outside" source of meaning.
Then what happens if a dedicated scholar who speaks two or more languages translates a work? Even, let's say for the sake of argument, one of Derrida's works or Foucault's into, say, English? Are there such things as better translations and worse ones? If so, how on earth could any other scholars judge a translation to be a "good" one? It gets at Derrida or Foucault's intended meaning more accurately in the new language? What "meaning"? One outside the text? I thought they said that can't exist.
You see, here's the real stunner. If at a very fundamental level all communication is just the bandying about of familiar sounds or marks on a page between people who share a set of conventions about their ways of venting their feelings (which is all that's left if deconstruction is right) as they process "texts", then genuine communication of anything substantive from outside of this particular communication act cannot happen. But it does.
"Careful. That patient has AIDS." or "Watch it! That truck driver can't see you in his rearview mirrors!" Does the content of these communications or others like them matter? How could it if there is no way we can talk to each other about "matter"?
At the level of fundamental, subconscious understanding between the parties involved in any act of communication, the postmodernists ask us to accept that we aren't really communicating anything of substance ...while simultaneously we actually are.
This is the equivalent of our accepting, again at a level we aren't normally even aware of, a logical claim of the form "A and not-A". My friends trained in Symbolic Logic, I hope, should be having a calf right now. If we accept "A and not-A" in any set of statements in any system of logic, what we can then conclude is ...anything. ANYTHING.
Yes. That is how grand an illusion postmodernism is. Little wonder that people in Anthropology and other fields who have fallen under the pomo spell can listen to arguments reviling a given cultural more or practice and then some other arguments defending it, in the same speech or article, and agree with them both.
Everything is everything. Everything is everything. Distinguishing between things in the physical world, becomes impossible. We can't trust any such communications. They are all illusions. I can ignore grizzly bear stalking my unaware friend. If I don't tell him anything bad, nothing bad can happen.
The problem is that right at the level of individual human sanity, we survive and navigate through the day by watching events around us and responding to them in mostly effective ways that we can only devise based on concepts that are rooted in sense data. In the real, material world, in other words. Ways of organizing our flows of sense data and reacting effectively to them. Being able to talk to one another about the things we can agree we both see in reality is a useful trait we picked up when we acquired language. To now decide that we don't need any ways of talking about meanings that come from outside the communication act is to turn our backs on 200,000 years of human evolution. For what? Smugness? Complacency? Niceness?
A human who no longer has any trusted concepts in place becomes catatonic. Sits and stares and drools. And yes, concepts sometimes can be inaccurate of even wholly mistaken. But there is no chance of one person helping another to see that if no reference to evidence outside of the debate is possible.
Postmodernism, in short, is a playing at insanity. So clever. Aren't they brave?
Why on earth would anyone ever cook up such a worldview? I think I see why.
The human mind is naturally powerfully disposed toward cognitive dissonance reduction. In any situation in which we feel that our basic beliefs and values are threatened, we are very creative at finding explanations for the events or texts that are disturbing us. Explanations that make the upsetting events or texts seem trivial, unimportant, or mistaken. Whatever works to reduce our cognitive dissonance. Deep inside, we need to like ourselves. The biggest lies we tell are often the ones we tell ourselves because we need to.
In Europe, and especially in France, after World War Two, millions of people had stores of memories so painful that they did not want to look at them. Across Europe, new lows for humanity were spoken and performed by people in all walks of life. Doctors who did grotesque medical experiments for the Nazis. Judges who enforced grotesque laws. University professors who taught "German" Science. Clergymen. Lawyers. Teachers. Welders. Carpenters. Drivers. Laborers. Women who were homemakers who screamed themselves hoarse in joyous response to Hitler's speeches. All of them not only abandoned their Jewish neighbors and colleagues, but even turned them in to the Gestapo. And then felt righteous about it. Frenchmen and many others fought against the Nazis and then for them and then against them and over and over, against each other.
Think of the ambivalence, anger, and sadness you stir up if you try to talk to the Baby Boomers in the U.S. about the Vietnam era. Then multiply that by at least three times.
Postmodernism is a rationalization in the whole consciousness of Europe, but it has spread to much of the rest of the human race because it is so tempting. So comforting. We like to be nice. The problem is that reality sometimes isn't nice and what we don't acknowledge we can't fix.
So let's close today's post with a challenge:
Postmodernists. If the whole field of History is made merely of a bunch of "narratives", every one of them just as true as every other one of them, then ...did the Holocaust happen or didn't it?
(credit: Wikipedia)
If there is nothing outside the text (as Derrida once put it), then there is no such thing as some material world event or object or process that any one of our words actually refers to. The process of communication during which we get the meaning of someone else's speech or article is all happening inside of an inescapable network of words and in the end, all the words can refer to is each other. There is no "outside" source of meaning.
Then what happens if a dedicated scholar who speaks two or more languages translates a work? Even, let's say for the sake of argument, one of Derrida's works or Foucault's into, say, English? Are there such things as better translations and worse ones? If so, how on earth could any other scholars judge a translation to be a "good" one? It gets at Derrida or Foucault's intended meaning more accurately in the new language? What "meaning"? One outside the text? I thought they said that can't exist.
You see, here's the real stunner. If at a very fundamental level all communication is just the bandying about of familiar sounds or marks on a page between people who share a set of conventions about their ways of venting their feelings (which is all that's left if deconstruction is right) as they process "texts", then genuine communication of anything substantive from outside of this particular communication act cannot happen. But it does.
"Careful. That patient has AIDS." or "Watch it! That truck driver can't see you in his rearview mirrors!" Does the content of these communications or others like them matter? How could it if there is no way we can talk to each other about "matter"?
At the level of fundamental, subconscious understanding between the parties involved in any act of communication, the postmodernists ask us to accept that we aren't really communicating anything of substance ...while simultaneously we actually are.
This is the equivalent of our accepting, again at a level we aren't normally even aware of, a logical claim of the form "A and not-A". My friends trained in Symbolic Logic, I hope, should be having a calf right now. If we accept "A and not-A" in any set of statements in any system of logic, what we can then conclude is ...anything. ANYTHING.
Yes. That is how grand an illusion postmodernism is. Little wonder that people in Anthropology and other fields who have fallen under the pomo spell can listen to arguments reviling a given cultural more or practice and then some other arguments defending it, in the same speech or article, and agree with them both.
Everything is everything. Everything is everything. Distinguishing between things in the physical world, becomes impossible. We can't trust any such communications. They are all illusions. I can ignore grizzly bear stalking my unaware friend. If I don't tell him anything bad, nothing bad can happen.
The problem is that right at the level of individual human sanity, we survive and navigate through the day by watching events around us and responding to them in mostly effective ways that we can only devise based on concepts that are rooted in sense data. In the real, material world, in other words. Ways of organizing our flows of sense data and reacting effectively to them. Being able to talk to one another about the things we can agree we both see in reality is a useful trait we picked up when we acquired language. To now decide that we don't need any ways of talking about meanings that come from outside the communication act is to turn our backs on 200,000 years of human evolution. For what? Smugness? Complacency? Niceness?
A human who no longer has any trusted concepts in place becomes catatonic. Sits and stares and drools. And yes, concepts sometimes can be inaccurate of even wholly mistaken. But there is no chance of one person helping another to see that if no reference to evidence outside of the debate is possible.
Postmodernism, in short, is a playing at insanity. So clever. Aren't they brave?
Why on earth would anyone ever cook up such a worldview? I think I see why.
The human mind is naturally powerfully disposed toward cognitive dissonance reduction. In any situation in which we feel that our basic beliefs and values are threatened, we are very creative at finding explanations for the events or texts that are disturbing us. Explanations that make the upsetting events or texts seem trivial, unimportant, or mistaken. Whatever works to reduce our cognitive dissonance. Deep inside, we need to like ourselves. The biggest lies we tell are often the ones we tell ourselves because we need to.
In Europe, and especially in France, after World War Two, millions of people had stores of memories so painful that they did not want to look at them. Across Europe, new lows for humanity were spoken and performed by people in all walks of life. Doctors who did grotesque medical experiments for the Nazis. Judges who enforced grotesque laws. University professors who taught "German" Science. Clergymen. Lawyers. Teachers. Welders. Carpenters. Drivers. Laborers. Women who were homemakers who screamed themselves hoarse in joyous response to Hitler's speeches. All of them not only abandoned their Jewish neighbors and colleagues, but even turned them in to the Gestapo. And then felt righteous about it. Frenchmen and many others fought against the Nazis and then for them and then against them and over and over, against each other.
Think of the ambivalence, anger, and sadness you stir up if you try to talk to the Baby Boomers in the U.S. about the Vietnam era. Then multiply that by at least three times.
Postmodernism is a rationalization in the whole consciousness of Europe, but it has spread to much of the rest of the human race because it is so tempting. So comforting. We like to be nice. The problem is that reality sometimes isn't nice and what we don't acknowledge we can't fix.
So let's close today's post with a challenge:
Postmodernists. If the whole field of History is made merely of a bunch of "narratives", every one of them just as true as every other one of them, then ...did the Holocaust happen or didn't it?
(credit: Wikipedia)
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