Nihilism and neodialectic discourse

[Jeremy]

Nihilism and neodialectic discourse

P. Hans Dahmus
Department of Politics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology


1. Expressions of dialectic

In the works of Fellini, a predominant concept is the concept of textual truth. Thus, many desublimations concerning prepatriarchialist socialism exist.

The characteristic theme of la Tournier’s[1] critique of neodialectic discourse is the difference between class and reality. The premise of nihilism implies that class, ironically, has intrinsic meaning, but only if Marx’s essay on neodeconstructive capitalism is invalid; otherwise, Lacan’s model of nihilism is one of “the patriarchialist paradigm of consensusâ€

[Iron Clad Ben]

We're not all philosophy scholars.

Care to paraphrase this in laymen's terms? I wouldn't post a bunch of engineering literature, diagrams or equations up here and expect everyone to know what I was talking about. A couple of those words "desublimations" and "postcapitalist" I couldn't even find on wiktionary or dictionary.com. Without context I can't really make sense of what they mean here.

You do realize that by posting this kind of jargon-heavy rhetoric you just further many people's perception here that you are a self-congratulatory pompus ass. While I have plenty of reason to believe you aren't, this isn't helping your case. I've no doubt you're a very smart individual but it seems like you have difficulty relating and communicating to others. I agree with you on many issues, but that doesn't prevent me from disliking your communication style and the way you treat people in discussions here.

No, I do not understand 80% of this stuff, but my suspicion is that you did not expect people here to understand. Otherwise you would have posted it to a philosophy forum.

Tell me honestly, what was your goal in posting up this here? To illicit responses to which you could debate/argue with people and end up being the victor because it's some obscure niche of philosophy that most people know very little or nothing about?

Or was your intention to educate? If so, what is your message? I was not able to decipher it through all the jargon. You didn't even often your own opinion on this, which definitely makes me suspect that this is flame-bait (whether you really intended it to be or not).

One last question, and I honestly believe the answer is yes, but part of me wants confirmation, did you really read all of these books?

1. la Tournier, I. F. ed. (1996) The Collapse of Culture: Neodialectic discourse and nihilism. And/Or Press

2. Dahmus, T. (1984) Nihilism and neodialectic discourse. Yale University Press

3. Finnis, W. G. ed. (1991) The Narrative of Rubicon: Neodialectic discourse in the works of Pynchon. Loompanics

[junkyardjew]

Care to paraphrase this in laymen's terms? I wouldn't post a bunch of engineering literature, diagrams or equations up here and expect everyone to know what I was talking about. A couple of those words "desublimations" and "postcapitalist" I couldn't even find on wiktionary or dictionary.com. Without context I can't really make sense of what they mean here.

The difference of course is that engineers spend about half of their time actually explaining their results to laymen - if an engineer spouted that much nonsense at you, you would instantly fire them and find another who could explain it more clearly.

That kind of writing is designed solely to be read by other academics - it is in fact specifically structured to be incomprehensible to laypeople - its not by accident that you don't understand those words, they're used SPECIFICALLY to keep you from understanding.

The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves. But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited.

This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality. Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers.

I have to admit that I love deconstructing deconstructions, for example, from Jeremy's post

The subject is interpolated into a textual dematerialism that includes reality as a reality.

I don't think I even need to get into that one...

It could be said that Baudrillard suggests the use of nihilism to read sexuality.

It could also be said a lot of other things. Actually, that sentance makes me think that maybe this whole thing is a joke... are you fucking with us Jeremy? I could google and try and find the essay but I'm not interested enough.

I'm pretty sure this is a put on essay, but if it's not, it could use a thesis.

[Tsiangkun]

P. Hans Dahmus
Thoughts?

I think it provides a tactile, and yet non deconstructive, interface to a textual representation of sexuality; in a world where reality is reality for the dematerialized I like to pronounce his name as Fans da Moose.

[Tsiangkun]

my last post wasn't furthering the discussion.

My thought is that this " In the works of Fellini, a predominant concept is the concept of textual truth." is the most coherent statement in that entire pile of steaming hot shit.

The rest is just linguistic masturbation.

Thoughts ?

I challenge any of you to find a completely understandable sentence in that entire post of jeremy's.

[Jeremy]

Interesting responses. I should have mentioned that the essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

Which leads me on to my next point, is post modernism actually just a load of rubbish?

[dyalander]

One last question, and I honestly believe the answer is yes, but part of me wants confirmation, did you really read all of these books?

Jeremy wrote:
1. la Tournier, I. F. ed. (1996) The Collapse of Culture: Neodialectic discourse and nihilism. And/Or Press

2. Dahmus, T. (1984) Nihilism and neodialectic discourse. Yale University Press

3. Finnis, W. G. ed. (1991) The Narrative of Rubicon: Neodialectic discourse in the works of Pynchon. Loompanics

These are not references Jeremy is claiming to have consulted they are references Dahmus is claiming to have consulted in constructing his article.

I'm only familiar with one of Fellini's works "8 1/2" and I'd agree that in it "a predominant concept is the concept of textual truth". However, I dispute Dahmus' "thus". It does not necessarily follow that a consideration of textual truth is "a consideration of prepatriarchialist socialism". Clearly Dahmus is keenly interested in it and is keen to read it into Fellini's work - this is not to say that it is there to begin with. His article has no textual reference so we have no way of evaluating this "thus".
While I'm not familiar with Marx's essay on neodeconstructive capitalism or Lacan's model of nihilism, it seems that Dahmas does the same for Fellini as he does for any of the other works he quotes - ie reads into them his pre held ideas.
I think part of what Dahmus is doing is pointing out that "neodialectic discourse" is an empty terms and is used by different people for different things. In general terms it simply refers to what is generally known as "postmodern discourse". Unfortunately his work is poorly structured and expressed. eg. "Derrida’s critique of neodialectic discourse implies that art may be used to reinforce sexism. It could be said that the primary theme of the works of Fellini is the bridge between culture and class. " While the first sentence makes sense both in itself and as a evaluation of part of Derrida's work, why and how it is linked to the next sentence is unclear. Yes that could be said, but why would you say it and what evidence supports it and how does it fit in with the broader thesis. If a student handed me this it be returned covered in red pen. If this was delivered to me by a lecturer there would be a barrage of questions in response.
What exactly is it - is it an article for something, notes from a larger lecture?
Someone posted in reply that its specifically designed to be indecipherable by laypeople and that is spot on (although the jargon is still intended to refer to particular ideas which can be deciphered with the correct points of reference), but even from an academic standpoint it seems to me something's missing - perhaps its context would clear this up, but it's highly fragmented, some of the sentencves just don't follow from one another.

edit - I wrote the above while Jeremy was posting the post announcing it was all bullshit so Itreated it as if it were supposed to make sense. In response to the question of whetehr it shows postmodernism is rubbush I'd say that it shows that mostpeople don't understand postmodernism but not that it is rubbush. As I said if this was given to me in at uni (I'm doing a Phd in English Lit) in any context it wouldn't stand up. The jargon of postmodernism does actually refer to ideas and concepts and if you put them together randomly bits and pieces might make some sense but the rest won't.

[Jeremy]

So define post modernism for us please Dyalan.

A friend of mine recently told me that one of his lectures said he'd been studying post-modernism for 30 years (that could be an exaggeration) and still didn't know what it was, although he did know that The Simpsons was one of the most post modern shows around.

[Jeremy]

This is the article I found the postmoderism generator from (although the site has moved from what is linked).

Postmodernism Disrobed
by Richard Dawkins, Nature

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. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered." Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze had a similar talent for writing:-

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable,' endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

It calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterisation of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):

Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought . . .

Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:

I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.

This is from Medawar 1968 Lecture on "Science and Literature", reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.

Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great. . . Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, comment that "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences – sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous – and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge."

But it's tough on the reader. 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?

Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively New York University and the University of Louvain. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal: on Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout American and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:

. . . although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish.

They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:

Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:

S (signifier) = s (the statement),
s (signified)
With S = (-1), produces: s = sqrt(-1)

You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning which is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ

. . . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).

We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.

The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who is given whole chapter treatment by 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 the school of thought under examination 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) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:

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).

In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Lyotard's 'postmodern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of Gödel's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view":

Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.

I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense." They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology – inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning." Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticised here, and lionised throughout America:

In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, 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 around, 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 Alan 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 somebody punctures the established bag of wind.

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American journal Social Text a paper called 'Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.' From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Normal Levitt's Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science (Johns Hopkins, 1994), an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In Gary Kamiya's words:

Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,' 'transgressive,' 'Lacanian,' 'hegemony,' to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted . . . Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy) . . . And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit – a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.

Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature.
Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic lekking arena. Andrew Ross himself has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like "I am glad to be rid of English Departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them." He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of America's best universities. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know – because many of them have told me – that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Alan Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left wing credentials are impeccable.

In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half truths, falsehoods and non-sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever." He regrets that there were not more of the latter: "I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If he were writing his parody today, he'd surely have been helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it, at http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo [fixed link; Jez], it will spontaneously generate for you, using falutless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000 word article called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context" by "David I.L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge who saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here's a typical sentence from this impressively erudite work:

If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious.

Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.

As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed.

[Iron Clad Ben]

A clever ruse indeed Jeremy. You definitely got me. As far as random generators, www.says-it.com is hilarious.

Seriously, you could be the Ashton Kutcher of academia. "You liked that paper!... well you've just be PUNK'D!!! Ohhh!!! snapp!!!!!11"



BTW I wanted to punch the woman who made those comments about solid mechanics taking precedent over fluid mechanics. If she'd actually taken the time to study both of these in depth she'd find that fluid mechanics is tremendously more complex than solid mechanics. Einstein, ON HIS FUCKING DEATHBED lamented the fact that he never fully understood turbulent flow. Arguably the scientist who contributed the most to science in the 20th century was sexist because he struggled with fluid mechanics? Give me a break lady. The science of modern fluid mechanics is rather young, only a couple hundred years, and most of the mathematical breakthroughs that allowed us to understand some more common flow phenomena did not happen until mid way through the 20th century. I'm not buying any bullshit that there is some causal relationship with that and woman's sufferage and lib. It was computers that allowed us to reach numeric solutions for many of the partial differential equations that were way too cumbersome to solve manually.

Sorry, tangent. I <3 Fluid Mechanics.

[Outsider]

I'm only familiar with one of Fellini's works "8 1/2" and I'd agree that in it "a predominant concept is the concept of textual truth".

I've only seen one other Fellini film besides 8.5. Its called "Fellini's Satyricon", and its totally outrageous. I recommend it. It is, apparently, an adaptation of a collection of roman stories taking place during the reign of emperor Nero. That is, I believe, it was actually written then. Its been a long time since I saw it, but I suppose you could say its the roman version of The Canterbury Tales. Its raunchy, but beautifully and humorously so.

Anyway,

Postmodernism = cool, but man cannot live on postmodernism alone.

ps. I understand postmodernism better than anyone else alive, the answer came to me in a dream, but I'm not allowed to tell you guys the secret.

[dyalander]

Postmodernism simply refers to exactly waht the nature of thew ord suggest "post" =after "modernism" = Modernism (as in the literery and art movement Modernity).
While plenty of it is indeed rubbish, including plenty of psuedo-mathmatical/scientific/psychological theories, there is also plenty of it which is useful even if expressed in a peculiarly dense vernacular.
It's hardly a clever ruse, it simply a straw-man argument. There are far more credible ways of disputing most post-modern theories on theoretical terms - ie as Dawkins does with the pseudo-mathmatics of Lacan. Though interestingly he doesn't take on the likes of De Man, Derrida, Barthes, Habbermas or even Delluse on grounds of their content. They are much more difficult targets as most of them tended to avoid trite analogies such as the bullshit feminist and marxist analogies rife in the work that followed them. However to simply say that a vernacular that extends beyond that in normal usage is the mark of meaninglessness is not true - ie Dawkins objection to Delluse does not dispute the content of his work it simply claims that it is unintelligible - which it no doubt is to many, perhaps including him - but that does not necessarily disprove its content. Nor does Dawkins claim that, he simply asks "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?" Well you can trust the rigour of the training provided academics in the field of lit crit in the same way you trust any expert dealing in concepts you don't understand - or you can engage with the concepts and sort the rubbish from the useful theory for yourself. WHen someone uses these terms which mark postmodern criticism they cannot be accepted simply because they sound right, nor can they simply be accepted because they quote one of "the big guns" of lit-theory, they need to be brought to account. Clearly the first option has its dangers in light of all the hoaxes, but surely the solution is not to throw out the whole concept of postmodern theory simply because it can be distorted into meaningless text, or not always submittedto the appropriate rigours. Instead the work simply needs to be submited to closer inspection. As I said when I read what Jeremy initially posted, if it were presented in the academic context of which I am a part it wouldn't stand up. Similiarly if I were to fillmy thesis with references to quantam mechanics then The University of Sydney would supply a marker who had the relevent knowledge to bring those referneces to account. Should my workbe discarded simply because another university somewhere else didn't submit someone else's thesis to the same rigours? Of course not.
As for those proponents of postmodernism who treat lit crit as no more than a giant word game, I've never encountered such a theorist in my studies. The only postmodernists who claim to be "playing games" to my knowledge are people like the "L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets" and other people engeged in the posmodern artwork itself - this shouldn't be confused with postmodern literary theory.
I'd recommend reading De Man's "Resistance to Theory". Yes it is written in the turgid "French intellectual" style, but it does not fall into bullshit analogies or pseudo-science. It, in part, speaks to the problems and advantages of the style of theory it embodies.
<edit>I noticed you replied before I could finish my edit - I think I edited in the bit about Dawkins not taking on the likes of De Man et al. And writing this in is the second edit. <edit>

[Jeremy]

You failed to answer my question regarding defining post modernism. Yes it means "after modernism," I think everybody knows what "post" means, but actually what is it?

I think Noam Chomsky summed it up best with this quote;

-------

There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

[dyalander]

Again I'd answer, the things Chomsky doesn't understand about Foucault do not necessarily undermine the validity of the things he does understand nor do they undermine the entirity of Foucault's work. Nor do they necessarliy have anything to do with De Man's work or with Postmodern literary theory as a genre.
As for defining "Postmodernism" unfortunately it doesn't operate in the same way that "Physics" does. It is not simply a generic term - it's a generic term that operates within broader genres, and within each genre it means something different - so a post-modern film refers to certain type of film, and a post-modern literary theory refers to a certain type of theory but the characteristics that define the film and theory as "postmodern" are not the same. The only thing all of those uses of postmodern have in common is that they refer to characteristics that are considerd to be distincitve by the way in which they relate to the set of distinctive aesthetic and theoretical conventions found in society (particualrly Western society) following WWII. Postmodern defines a period however people and things can be considered to be behind the times or ahead of their time and thus not everything written now is considered post-midern, just as not everything written in the C18 was Romantic. So what are considered to be characteristic of the post-modern period - well that will depend upon what field you're looking into.

[Jeremy]

So if you can't answer the question, does "post moderism" actually exist, or is it just a meaningless word used by people who actually have nothing constructive to add to human society and culture?

This is the debate; Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky and many other academics claim that the concept of "post modernism" is meaningless and people who define themselves as "post modernists" or who work in this "field" are producing meaningless work.

[junkyardjew]

So if you can't answer the question, does "post moderism" actually exist, or is it just a meaningless word used by people who actually have nothing constructive to add to human society and culture?

This is the debate; Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky and many other academics claim that the concept of "post modernism" is meaningless and people who define themselves as "post modernists" or who work in this "field" are producing meaningless work.

Woah now, lets not get ahead of ourselves here. That's not the debate at all. Noam Chomsky is not saying that the concept of "post modernism" is meaningless any more than the concept of "film noir" is meaningless. And I think Dylan did a good job of summing up its actual meaning.

Just to prove by analogy, people describe films as "film noir" if they include characteristics that are associated with that label. Often from a particular time period, but just as often not. The Coen Brothers "Millers Crossing" is considered part of the "Film Noir" genre because it echoes the stylistics markers of that genre. Although it was made in a time period after the "modern" time period, it is by no means "post-modern".

The literary stylings of Dave Eggers on the other hand, would be considered "post-modern" - say, his short love story where a tree and a cloud have a short, movie script style conversation at the centre. The techniques he uses to convey tension and emotion are specific to a group of artists working from a surrealist base, etc etc.

You see what i'm getting at? Post-Modernism is not a noun that either exists or doesn't exist, it is not a theory that can be disproved. It is a label.

Astrology is obviously bullshit, do star charts not exist? Perhaps post-modern lit-crit is bullshit (I think a lot of it is, but you'd agree that I'm mostly no your side on this one) but is post modernism a "meaningless word used by people who actually have nothing constructive to add to human society and culture?"

I think that if you look at it objectively, you'll see that the answer is clear.

[BainbridgeShred]

Do any of you guys know Ken Wilber? I'm curious to know what you guys would think of his "Transmodernism" because I find myself agreeing with it a lot of times, and he seems like a pretty smart dude. I'm no Philosoph though, so I'd be real curious to hear you guys opinions especially on the All Quadrants/All Levels part of his work.

So if you can't answer the question, does "post moderism" actually exist, or is it just a meaningless word used by people who actually have nothing constructive to add to human society and culture?

My answer to this question, even though as I said I'm no Philosoph, is that yes post modernism is a meaningless word used by people who actually have very little to contribute to society and culture. I use to totally despise post modernism in all it's forms, until I started to see it's influences on me persoanlly and on my writing. Not that I'm the type of writer who focuses on a bunch of technical or philosophical principles in my themes, quite the contrary, but nowaday's I have a hard time totally despising it.

[BainbridgeShred]

"...postmodernism is basically a mood of criticism". -Wilber


It isn't really even an art style, it's a school or criticism. Just like New Style in how works of literature began to pop up in it's form.