Criticism of postmodernism

Criticisms of postmodernism, while intellectually diverse, share the opinion that it lacks coherence and is hostile to the notion of absolutes, such as truth. Specifically it is held that postmodernism can be meaningless, promotes obscurantism and uses relativism (in culture, morality, knowledge) to the extent that it cripples most judgement calls.

Postmodernism is a highly diverse intellectual and artistic activity, and two branches (for example, postmodern literature and postmodern philosophy) can have little in common. Criticism of postmodernism in general is usually not a comprehensive attack on the various diverse movements labelled postmodern. Such criticism often refers to specific branches of postmodernism, frequently on intellectual theories in the humanities (philosophy, history, gender and LGBT+ studies, structuralism, cultural relativism and "theory"). Postmodern philosophy is also a frequent subject of criticism for obscurantism and resistance to reliable knowledge. For example, a philosopher may criticize French postmodern philosophy but have no problem with postmodern cinema. Conversely, philosopher Roger Scruton criticized postmodern humanities and some elements of postmodern art, yet never broadly attacked the entire inventory of varied postmodern projects. One of the very criticisms of postmodernism, as a whole, is the absence of a definition of what postmodernism in itself is and even what specific post-modern anything is.

Vagueness

Linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond like people in other fields when asked:

Seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.[1]

Christopher Hitchens in his book, Why Orwell Matters, writes, in advocating for simple, clear and direct expression of ideas, "The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose."[2] Hitchens also criticized a postmodernist volume, "The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism":[3] "The French, as it happens, once evolved an expression for this sort of prose: la langue de bois, the wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and the dishonest can be offered. (This book) is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities."

In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins writes in a favorable review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures:[4]

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.

Dawkins then uses the following quotation from Félix Guattari as an example of this "lack of content" and of clarity.

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.

It has been suggested that the term "postmodernism" is a mere buzzword that means nothing. For example, Dick Hebdige, in Hiding in the Light, writes:

When it becomes possible for a people to describe as 'postmodern' the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a 'scratch' video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the 'intertextual' relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the 'metaphysics of presence', a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the 'predicament' of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the 'de-centring' of the subject, an 'incredulity towards metanarratives', the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the 'implosion of meaning', the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a 'media', 'consumer' or 'multinational' phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of 'placelessness' or the abandonment of placelessness ('critical regionalism') or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all these things as 'Postmodern' (or more simply using a current abbreviation as 'post' or 'very post') then it's clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.[5]

Postmodernists or postmodern-friendly intellectuals such as the British historian Perry Anderson defend the existence of the varied meanings assigned to the term "postmodernism", claiming they only contradict one another on the surface and that a postmodernist analysis can offer insight into contemporary culture.[6] Kaya Yılmaz defends the lack of clarity and consistency in the term's definition. Yılmaz points out that because the theory itself is "anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist" it is fitting that the term cannot have any essential or fundamental meaning.[7] Sokal has critiqued similar defenses of postmodernism by noting that replies like this only demonstrate the original point that postmodernist critics are making: that a clear and meaningful answer is always missing and wanting.

Moral relativism

Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler offer the following definition of postmodernism: "A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn't exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered. ... [Truth is] created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures."[8] Culturally conservative writers, such as Charles Colson, are characterized as tending to look askance at the postmodernist era as ideologically agnostic and replete with moral relativism or situation ethics.[9] Other critics, have interpreted postmodern society to be synonymous with moral relativism and contributing to deviant behavior.[10][11][9]

Many philosophical movements reject both modernity and postmodernity as healthy states of being. Some of these are associated with cultural and religious conservatism that views postmodernity as a rejection of basic spiritual or natural truths and in its emphasis on material and physical pleasure an explicit rejection of inner balance and spirituality. Many of these critiques attack specifically the tendency to the "abandonment of objective truth" as the crucial unacceptable feature of the postmodern condition[12] and often aim to offer a meta-narrative that provides this truth.

Marxian criticisms

Alex Callinicos attacks notable postmodern thinkers such as Baudrillard and Lyotard, arguing postmodernism "reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of 1968, (particularly those of May 1968 in France) and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right."[13]

Art historian John Molyneux, also of the Socialist Workers' Party, accuses postmodernists for "singing an old song long intoned by bourgeois historians of various persuasions".[14]

Fredric Jameson, American literary critic and Marxist political theorist, attacks postmodernism (or poststructuralism), what he claims is "the cultural logic of late capitalism", for its refusal to critically engage with the metanarratives of capitalization and globalization. The refusal renders postmodernist philosophy complicit with the prevailing relations of domination and exploitation.[15]

Art Bollocks

Art Bollocks is an article written by Brian Ashbee which appeared in the magazine Art Review in April 1999.[16] Ashbee refers to the importance given to language in "post-modern" art.[16] The post-modern art forms mentioned by Ashbee are: "installation art, photography, conceptual art [and] video". The term bollocks in the title relates to nonsense.

An example can be found in Private Eye issue 1482, being an imaginary interview of Tracey Emin by an unduly fawning Alan Yentob.[17]

Sokal affair

Main article: Sokal affair

Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, formulated the Sokal affair, a hoax in which he wrote a deliberately nonsensical article in a style similar to postmodernist articles. The article was enthusiastically accepted for publication by the journal Social Text despite the obvious lampooning of postmodernists view of science. Sokal liberally used vague post-modernist concepts and lingo all the while criticising empirical approaches to knowledge. On the same day of the release he published another article in a different journal explaining the Social Text article. This was turned into a book Fashionable Nonsense which offered a critique of the practices of postmodern academia.[18] In the book he and Jean Brichmont point out the missuse of scientific terms in the works of postmodern philosophers but they state that this does not invalide the rest of the work of those philosophers to which they suspend judgement.[19]

Mumbo Jumbo

Francis Wheen's book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World broadly critiques a variety of non-critical paradigms with a significant critique of cultural relativism and the use of postmodern tropes to explain all modern geo-political phenomena. According to Wheen, postmodern scholars tend to critique unfair power structures in the west including issues of race, class, patriarchy, the effect of radical capitalism and political oppression. Where he finds fault in these tropes is when the theories go beyond evidence-based critical thinking and use vague terminology to support obscurantist theories. An example is Luce Irigaray's assertion, cited by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their book Fashionable Nonsense,[20] that the equation "E=mc²" is a "sexed equation", because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us". Relativism, according to Wheen becomes a sort of wall which shields non western cultures from the same sustained critiques. While inherent sexism in North America is open to hostile critique (as it should be according to Wheen), according to postmodern thought it is taboo to critique honour killings and female genital mutilation in North Africa and the Middle East. Relativism will defend such taboos by claiming such cultures are out of the sphere of shared Western values and that we cannot judge other cultures by our own standards or it is defended through diminishing the severity of sexism by either denying its prominence (as Western propaganda/misunderstanding) or blaming it on menacing western factors (imperialism, globalization, western hegemony, resource exploitation and Western interference in general). Wheen admits that, while some of this may have merit, its case is highly exaggerated by relativism. Wheen reserves his strongest critique for those who defend even the most appalling systemic mistreatment of women, even in countries where Western contact and influence is minimal.[21]

See also

• Postmodernism Generator

References

1. Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism
2. Christopher Hitchens. Why Orwell matters, Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465030507, 2002
3. Christopher Hitchens. Transgressing the Boundaries. NY Times, May 22, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/books/review/transgressing-the-boundaries.html
4. Richard Dawkins (1998/2007). Postmodernism disrobed. Retrieved 28 February 2016. Originally published in Nature 394:141–43.
5. Dick Hebdige, ’Postmodernism and "the other side"’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A reader, edited by John Storey, London, Pearson Education, 2006
6. Perry Anderson, in "The Origins of Postmodernity", London: Verso, 1998.
7. Yılmaz, K 2010, "Postmodernism and its Challenge to the Discipline of History: Implications for History Education", Educational Philosophy & Theory, 42:7, pp. 779–795, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2012.
8. Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler, The New Tolerance (Carol Stream IL: Tyndale House, 1998), p. 208.
9. Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute. Archived 2011-05-01 at the Wayback Machine
10. ""Truth Decay", Probe Ministries". Archived from the original on 2008-06-10. Retrieved 2009-09-11.
11. Wells, David F. Review:"Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision," 1998.
12. See for an example the Traditionalist School, in special the critical works by René Guénon.
13. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique 1990.
14. John Molyneux, Is Marxism deterministic? International Socialism Journal, Issue 68, Accessed December 20, 2010.
15. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,Duke UP, 1991.
16. "Art Bollocks". Ipod.org.uk. 1990-05-05. Archived from the original on January 31, 2015.CS1 maint: unfit url (link)
17. Private Eye, 15 Nov 2018, p.33.
18. Jedlitschka, Karsten (2018-08-05). "Guenter Lewy, Harmful and Undesirable. Book Censorship in Nazi Germany. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2016". Historische Zeitschrift. 307 (1): 274–275. doi:10.1515/hzhz-2018-1368. ISSN 2196-680X.
19. Sokal, Alan D.; Bricmont, J. (Jean) (1998). Fashionable nonsense : postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science. Internet Archive. New York : Picador USA. pp. x.
20. Richard Dawkins: Postmodernism Disrobed. Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143. Full text available at: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
21. Wheen, Francis (2012) How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions HarperCollins UK, ISBN 9780007382071.