I’d delight in telling you you’re wrong, but you’re mostly not.
I would say that I don’t think that postmodernism is lacking in rigor. Certainly, having been on both ends of peer review in the humanities, it does not seem to me that the process lets through a lot of flamingly inaccurate crap, beyond the sort of expected problems you get in the margins of well-studied ground. Frankly, in my own research, I’d have an easier time sailing a howler about the history of video games past peer review than I would a howler about the applications of Derrida.
I’m also not sure it does as badly as you say on Vladimir M’s heuristics. Looking quickly, for my own field, there’s still a ton of low-hanging fruit. Yeah, the major canonical works of literature assigned to undergraduates are pretty well-covered in the literature, but if you’re working in popular culture of any era, you have basically no excuse for running out of things to say. The ideology test is a little trickier, since there are areas of literary criticism—feminist, queer, and racial studies, most obviously—that are explicitly ideological. But, of course, we have to be careful with ideology as a warning sign, because arguably at this point climate science and biology are ideologically poisoned. Ideology takes place heavily outside of the academy, and I’m loathe to say that just because something has become a political hot potato the academics of it are prima facia problematic.
But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias. The thing that it is most easy to completely miss about postmodernism is that it is, by and large, a study of epistemologies. Yes, postmodernist literary criticism makes massive use of Freudian psychoanalysis despite the complete discrediting of Freudianism as an empirical practice. But we don’t psychoanalyze real people. We psychoanalyze fictional people. The question is not “does there exist a real person with an Oedipus complex,” it’s “is the Oedipus complex a sufficiently well-known concept that it would be either included in a work of fiction by an author or read into a work of fiction by a reader?” In other words, since we’re generally dealing with man-made structures, the question is less “Is foo true” and more “Is foo part of what is talked about and thought about regarding this subject?”
This helps a lot with the ideological bias issue, because it means that postmodernism can actually be ideologically neutral on the political issues it seemingly invests in. This is something I tell my students whenever one of them gets fussy about the fact that I assign literature with gay people in it. You don’t actually have to accept the premise “homosexuality is not a valid basis for discrimination” in order to understand how gay writers articulate their own experience in literature.
Now, in practice, of course, literary scholars are generally liberals who are supportive of gay rights, feminism, and further work towards racial and economic equality. But then again, the ideological bias in the academy extends far beyond humanities departments—it’s increasingly hard for an American climate scientist to be a Republican too. At the end of the day, this is somewhat irreducible—after all, reality probably does, in the long run, lend more support to some political viewpoints than others.
In any case, I tend to think that postmodernism is something that just about everybody should be broadly familiar with. I think there are some serious problems with how we teach it, and some serious problems with how it’s attacked (Alan Sokal should never, ever be referenced by anyone who is trying to make a serious point about humanities scholarship. His “research” on postmodernism makes his hoax article look like sound scholarship by comparison), but the basic elevator summary of postmodernism is “It’s the process of learning to account for epistemological differences when dealing with communications.” Which is something that is probably useful if, you know, you ever intend to talk to someone you disagree with in your life.
Also, can I just say that the Stanford Encyclopedia entry you linked to is absolutely terribly written? Clue for writers explaining concepts that use algebraic or pseudo-algebraic notation—it’s really nice if you bother to define what S and T mean before you start throwing them around.
But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias.
Actually, one of my major objections to the modern intellectual currents that are commonly called “postmodernist” is their bias—part ideological, part fashion-induced—in choosing which authors to consider as classics and standard sources of citations and inspiration. We keep seeing an endless stream of discussions using concepts from Marx, Freud, and others whose work has long been shown to be largely bunk (even if later authors have salvaged some of these concepts by reinterpretation), while on the other hand, there are many authors who have made important points about issues that postmodernists are directly concerned with, but I can hardly imagine them getting cited and discussed.
To take an example I find very interesting, one topic that has long fascinated me is political and ideological language and its meanings that reach beyond what’s being plainly said, and even beyond any conscious deceit and manipulation. (The link with the Overcoming Bias signaling leitmotifs is pretty clear here, and obviously the topic is of direct concern for all sorts of social and critical theorists—it’s falls squarely under the concept of “epistemological differences when dealing with communications.”) Yet when it comest to the best writings on the subject I’ve seen, they’re completely off the radar for postmodern academics, either because of ideological differences or otherwise because dropping their names won’t earn any prestige points.
I’d delight in telling you you’re wrong, but you’re mostly not.
I would say that I don’t think that postmodernism is lacking in rigor. Certainly, having been on both ends of peer review in the humanities, it does not seem to me that the process lets through a lot of flamingly inaccurate crap, beyond the sort of expected problems you get in the margins of well-studied ground. Frankly, in my own research, I’d have an easier time sailing a howler about the history of video games past peer review than I would a howler about the applications of Derrida.
I’m also not sure it does as badly as you say on Vladimir M’s heuristics. Looking quickly, for my own field, there’s still a ton of low-hanging fruit. Yeah, the major canonical works of literature assigned to undergraduates are pretty well-covered in the literature, but if you’re working in popular culture of any era, you have basically no excuse for running out of things to say. The ideology test is a little trickier, since there are areas of literary criticism—feminist, queer, and racial studies, most obviously—that are explicitly ideological. But, of course, we have to be careful with ideology as a warning sign, because arguably at this point climate science and biology are ideologically poisoned. Ideology takes place heavily outside of the academy, and I’m loathe to say that just because something has become a political hot potato the academics of it are prima facia problematic.
But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias. The thing that it is most easy to completely miss about postmodernism is that it is, by and large, a study of epistemologies. Yes, postmodernist literary criticism makes massive use of Freudian psychoanalysis despite the complete discrediting of Freudianism as an empirical practice. But we don’t psychoanalyze real people. We psychoanalyze fictional people. The question is not “does there exist a real person with an Oedipus complex,” it’s “is the Oedipus complex a sufficiently well-known concept that it would be either included in a work of fiction by an author or read into a work of fiction by a reader?” In other words, since we’re generally dealing with man-made structures, the question is less “Is foo true” and more “Is foo part of what is talked about and thought about regarding this subject?”
This helps a lot with the ideological bias issue, because it means that postmodernism can actually be ideologically neutral on the political issues it seemingly invests in. This is something I tell my students whenever one of them gets fussy about the fact that I assign literature with gay people in it. You don’t actually have to accept the premise “homosexuality is not a valid basis for discrimination” in order to understand how gay writers articulate their own experience in literature.
Now, in practice, of course, literary scholars are generally liberals who are supportive of gay rights, feminism, and further work towards racial and economic equality. But then again, the ideological bias in the academy extends far beyond humanities departments—it’s increasingly hard for an American climate scientist to be a Republican too. At the end of the day, this is somewhat irreducible—after all, reality probably does, in the long run, lend more support to some political viewpoints than others.
In any case, I tend to think that postmodernism is something that just about everybody should be broadly familiar with. I think there are some serious problems with how we teach it, and some serious problems with how it’s attacked (Alan Sokal should never, ever be referenced by anyone who is trying to make a serious point about humanities scholarship. His “research” on postmodernism makes his hoax article look like sound scholarship by comparison), but the basic elevator summary of postmodernism is “It’s the process of learning to account for epistemological differences when dealing with communications.” Which is something that is probably useful if, you know, you ever intend to talk to someone you disagree with in your life.
Also, can I just say that the Stanford Encyclopedia entry you linked to is absolutely terribly written? Clue for writers explaining concepts that use algebraic or pseudo-algebraic notation—it’s really nice if you bother to define what S and T mean before you start throwing them around.
Actually, one of my major objections to the modern intellectual currents that are commonly called “postmodernist” is their bias—part ideological, part fashion-induced—in choosing which authors to consider as classics and standard sources of citations and inspiration. We keep seeing an endless stream of discussions using concepts from Marx, Freud, and others whose work has long been shown to be largely bunk (even if later authors have salvaged some of these concepts by reinterpretation), while on the other hand, there are many authors who have made important points about issues that postmodernists are directly concerned with, but I can hardly imagine them getting cited and discussed.
To take an example I find very interesting, one topic that has long fascinated me is political and ideological language and its meanings that reach beyond what’s being plainly said, and even beyond any conscious deceit and manipulation. (The link with the Overcoming Bias signaling leitmotifs is pretty clear here, and obviously the topic is of direct concern for all sorts of social and critical theorists—it’s falls squarely under the concept of “epistemological differences when dealing with communications.”) Yet when it comest to the best writings on the subject I’ve seen, they’re completely off the radar for postmodern academics, either because of ideological differences or otherwise because dropping their names won’t earn any prestige points.