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A Primitive Understanding of the Matters that Plague Us, or, Things Went Crazy

School was fine enough, despite more than a couple of idiots. As a student of the arts in(a rather good) high school, I had a good time being exposed to a lot of jargonizing and

theorising. Ontology, Epistemology, and Semiotics in their incipient forms were frequent

subjects; and exegesis and explication de texte were familiar interpretive tools.

School ended with graduation, and in the months leading up to college, I busied myself

with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Plato, St Augustine, Kant, Descartes, medieval faithplays, the classics, and economic and pedagogic histories of empires, and, of course, old

80s cartoons and Terminator movie marathons. Then college began, and I was back in

academia.

While I was away, things went a little bit crazy.

A while ago, a good friend introduced me to Alan Sokals hoax article, Transgressing the

Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Since then, Ihave been devouring as much postmodernism as I can stomach. Small, well-spaced

portions are best, Ive discovered. One result is this article.

Postmodernism is a huge topic, with many parts, and as many focuses and emphases. Iwill make no attempt to be thorough. I dont have the patience, or the expertise, to be

thorough.

Postmodernism, as its name denotes, is a rejection of the central principles of modernism,

among others the Enlightenment concepts of progress, truth, rationality and identity.Postmodernism is a philosophy of cognitive relativism, which asserts that objective

truth is illusory, and that cultural contexts and language itself create a multiplicity ofequally valid subjective realities, typically called narratives.

All right, so that isnt too bad. In fact,there is considerable merit at this level of

postmodernist thought for anyone studying literature, history, sociology any academic

area whose content is, by its nature, more or less narrative to begin with.

After all, even in unenlightened school, those few interested in literary criticism (as was Ithen; but, alas, vainly) were made to read in extra classes Ronald Barthes The Death of

the Author. We really did appreciate the powerful tool that he gave us in the liberation

of meaning from authority. Re-conceptualizing the witch hunts of medieval Europe and

colonial America through a feminist lens provides both fresh perspective and a newhistory. These are powerful, often exciting expansions of our critical and interpretive

faculties.

Unfortunately, the postmodernist wave doesnt stop there, where it belongs, and where itmakes a real contribution.

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Before anyone objects, of course this is not to claim that postmodernism has nothing at

all to say about non-narrative or, more accurately, not-entirely-narrative topics,

like the physical sciences. The cultural frameworks and sociopolitical contexts of not-entirely-narrative subjects have been, and remain, fair game for postmodernist

interpretation.

My objections lie in two specific areas: the postmodernist murder of meaning, and the

subjective rebranding of objective scientific data.

Not satisfied with creating new meanings, postmodernist writers forge ahead and

cavalierly do away with meaning altogether. For them, meaning is, well,

meaningless. They proclaim that meaning is not only merely dead; it is really mostsincerely dead.

As an example, French philosopher Jacques Derrida championed a writing style that he

described as being purposefully ambiguous, so that his own words could illustrate what

they were claiming or werent claiming, to be consistent. Heres a snippet of Derrida onsome subject, but what that might be escapes me: In times absence what is new renews

nothing; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, but

represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return. It isnt, but comes back

again.

Got that? Maybe it loses something in the translation.

But wait, believe it or not, it gets worse when postmodernism leaves its natural home

in the humanities and tries to apply itself to the physical sciences.

There is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of examples of an inappropriate, sometimesabsurd misapplication of postmodernist notions to hard science, but one well-knownexample will suffice in this context. Cited by Richard Dawkins in his review of Sokal and

Bricmonts 1998 trashing of postmodernism,Fashionable Nonsense, postmodernist Luce

Irigaray attacks the masculine oppression inherent in the most famous equation inscience, E = mc2.

According to Irigaray, Einsteins formulation is a sexed equation because it privileges

the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us . Are we then

supposed to reject the ever-growing experimental evidence that Einsteins equation iscorrect, on the basis that it violates the equivalidity of all speeds, whatever the devil that

is? This is nonsense masquerading as analysis, Dawkins says, and so do I.

Beyond incomprehensibility, intended or unintended, and the inappropriate application of

linguistic and social epistemologies to the factual outcomes of hard science, other criticsdecry the jargonistic trendiness of postmodernism, its tendency to apply its theories

willy-nilly to this, that and everything, to claim all topics as the province of contextual

correlatives, or some other equally obscure terminology.

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One frequently quoted criticism is made along these lines by Dick Hebdige inHiding in

the Light.The passage itself is too lengthy for this space, but after cataloguing several

dozen areas claimed as evidence of the postmodern from the collapse of culturalhierarchies to the disillusionments of aging Baby Boomers to TV commercials

Hebdige concludes that, ifeverythingis postmodernist, we are in the presence of a

buzzword.

Finally, there is the formal logical criticism levelled by Sokal and many others: If,according to postmodernist theories, no meaning has objective meaning, on what basis

should we accept the truth of the postmodernist theory that no meaning has objective

meaning?

Really! I mean!

- Ruru Ghoshal