Matus1976 : Postmodernism

The Plague of Postmodernism
By Edward W. Younkins
http://www.solohq.com/Articles/Younkins/The_Plague_of_Postmodernism.shtml

Many of today’s leading intellectuals are postmodernists who accede to the ideas of anti-realism, skepticism, subjectivism, relativism, pragmatism, collectivism, egalitarianism, altruism, anti-individualism, the world as conflictual and contradictory, and emotions, instincts, and feelings as better and deeper guides to action than reason. The roots of the above ideas and to postmodernism can be traced to a number of thinkers including, but not limited to: Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Fichte, Dewey, Freud, Quine, Popper, Kuhn, Foucault, and Derrida.[i]

Proponents of postmodernism, the most active intellectual movement of the late 20th century, have replaced reality with subjective and noncommensurable social-linguistic constructs that vary across conflicting groups based on dimensions such as sex, ethnicity, race, religion, and wealth. The language and logic of each group is seen to be a function of its own conventional internal system. Given the postmodernist view that there is no connection of language to a non-linguistic reality, words are to be used as rhetorical weapons in a battle of competing wills involving the coercive assertion of each group’s interests. All words, concepts, and claims to truth can be deconstructed in a never-ending process in which each narrow subdivision of the human species vies to attain social power. Deconstruction has the effect of destroying (and thereby equalizing) the meaning and value of all truth claims. Because postmodernists view reason as subjective and as unable to know reality, they are not concerned about truth, consistency, and the existence of logical contradictions

Postmodernism Disrobed
By Richard Dawkins
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/archive/philosophy/dawkins_impost.html

"
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"

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 anau 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
"

How to deconstruct almost anything: My Postmodern Adventure
By Chip Morningstar
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/communications/papers/habitat/deconstr.txt

An excellent narrative of an Engineers experience attempting to figure out what postmodernism is and what exactly they are saying. It takes the reader through a description of where postmodernism came from, how it developed, and how it is maintained and thrives today.

"
Afterward, however, I was left with a sense that I should try to actually understand what these people were saying, really. I figured that one of three cases must apply. It could be that there was truly some content there of value, once you learned the lingo. If this was the case, then I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, perhaps there was actually content there but it was bogus (my working hypothesis), in which case I wanted to be able to respond to it credibly. On the third hand, maybe there was no content there after all, in which case I wanted to be able to write these clowns off without feeling guilty that I hadn't given them due consideration
"
...
"The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me - marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers - none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it. Contrast this situation with that of academia.

Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves - occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risque as to be newsworthy.

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient
amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gšdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties

How to speak and write Postmodern
by Stephen Katz
http://www.infiltec.com/j-postmd.htm

First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let's imagine you want to say something like, ``We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us''. This is honest but dull. Take the word ``views''. Postmodernspeak would change that to ``voices'', or better, ``vocalities'', or even better, ``multivocalities''. Add an adjective like ``intertextual'', and you're covered. ``People outside'' is also too plain. How about ``postcolonial others''? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentricism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic).

Why I am Not a Postmodernist
Edward R. Friedlander, M.D.
http://www.pathguy.com/postmod.htm

And of course

The Postmodern essay generator
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
"The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link. " Generates a new essay each time the page is loaded.