It all started with this e-mail to Shane and Ron:
Subject: postmodernism disrobed. Book review by
> Dawkins.
> I would love to hear your responses to this article:
>
>
Postmodernism Disrobed
by Richard Dawkins, Nature
Richard Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures
You can read the article Here.
Here is the back and forth thus far. Starting with Ron:
--- Ron (CI)
wrote:
> I don't have the time nor intelligence to give a
> detailed meta type
> response...I mean what do I know. But I can say that
> the first time I read
> a piece by Deleuze and Guttari I was blown away. It
> was beautiful because
> it pushed me to reimagine the world, to erase
> boundaries, to be, to use one
> of their terms, rhizomatic (roots growing in all
> directions) in my
> thinking, imagining new possibilities, instead of
> only "logical,"
> chronological, step by step.
>
> I think Dawkins and these authors oversimplify yet
> still offer an necessary
> critique. I want others to question whether all the
> pm stuff means anything
> and at times it doesn't. But to merely dismiss it
> all as blathering is
> silly.
>
> As you may know, Travis, this all goes right back to
> the debate we had
> about science. I think science needs a critque
> through language--which is
> what pm can do--because science however much it
> wants to be purely
> objective is held up by and through LANGUAGE. And,
> duh!!!, to critique it
> will mean to take language to its extreme, to its
> outer boundaries. Sure it
> will be convoluted and nonsensical at times because
> that's exactly what it
> is trying (sense, common sense, "reality") to
> dislode and disturb.
>
> Ron
Here is Shane's first response:
Interesting article. But I'm curious to know why
you're interested in my response--why you thought
of me when reading it. Are you insinuating that I'm
an intellectual imposture?
I'm also curious about why someone would go to the
lengths that the authors of "Intellectual Impostures"
did to prove that intellectual impostures exist.Of
course they do. And not all impostures are postmodernists.
Some of them are even scientists.
Even scholars who proudly adopt the postmodernist
label are aware that impostures exist. In fact,they
have a contest every year to see who can produce
the most jargon-ridden post-modernist writing samples.
And the writing looks a lot like the stuff quoted in
this review. But I hardly think that postmodernism as a
concept is "disrobed" because a few impostures have
been discovered. Just because some scientists are
still claiming that men are smarter than women
because men have larger brains (a claim that most
scientists once considered a proven fact) doesn't mean
that science has been "disrobed". Further, the whole
concept of "moral relativism" that this review really
takes aim at has nothing to do with"postmodernism" as
explained by Sartre or Derrida, the primary founders
of the "postmodernist movement" (neither of whom called
themselves "postmodernists", btw).
But Dawkins makes a few good points. For example,he
writes: "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 will we know the difference?"
It isn't easy. But, to reiterate, I think it's
important not to throw out everything resembling
postmodernism just because of a few or even a vast
number of bad eggs. Let's face it, most conspiracy
theorists are quacks. But, just as true, a lot of
conspiracy theories are now proven facts.
Not only that, but I think Dawkins incorrectly
characterizes the notion of "play" in postmodern
writing. What a lot of postmodernists are trying
to dois to redefine language. In other words, they're
refuting familiar depictions of reality; they're
"playing" with concepts of what's real and unreal
in order to question the status quo version of
history--saying that reality is not totalitarian;
it isn't absolute and it can be changed. That's a
political and revolutionary stance. If you're trying
to report and define reality, there is no need for
'play'--but if you don't believe language, any language
including mathematics, can report and define all the
subtleties of experience, then you need to treat lang-
uage in a very non-reverential and playful manner--in
a way that expands rather than clarifies understanding.
Moreover, I don't think most postmodernist
writers deliberately try to be unclear. But they
do, by virtue of the nature of their ideas, try to be
unfamiliar--and that makes them difficult. The Situa-
tionists, for example, advocated a deliberately
obscure style of writing, because they saw how
effectively capitalism co-opted all forms of
resistance--how it pigeon-holed all forms of expression
into convenient categories that accommodated mainstream
viewpoints. In response, they took familiar ideas and
sources and subverted them so that the viewer could
experience the work as something new--as something
without "purpose", meaning something autonomous in its
own right rather than as an instrument to be exploited.
Dawkins is also correct in exposing the way concepts
originating in the physical sciences are co-opted,
often wrongly, by philosophers and new agers the
world over. I think people do this because of the
privileged position that science has in our culture.
It's a way to give yourself credibility. It has the
opposite effect on me, though.
Okay, I'd better stop. I feel like I could go on
and on here. Maybe I should develop my thoughts more
and post on my blog.
At any rate, thanks for the link! Got my juices
going this morning for sure.
Talk to ya soon, amigo!
Shane
-------------------
HH:
Shane,
I did not think of you as a post-modernest. Your
erudition is clear, concise, and (often) biting. Yet,
I do think that, at times, (as Dawkins rightly points
out) there are postmodernists who use babble as a
substitute for substance. The focus on language and
its use has delved into an ethereal world in which
ONLY language matters. Sounds very Wittgenstein-like
to me (when he wrote, "the limits of my language are
the limits of my world." He was, of course wrong on
SOOO many levels.
When those who do espouse themselves as
postmordernists, are shown reasonably to be frauds,
its seems that it is SOME data towards whether the
whole system, istelf, need be put under scrutiny.?
In my view, we use words to convey meaning. When
that meaning is diluted and changed through
postmodernist rhetoric (rather than substance), it
seems that language is short-shrifted, and
communication becomes impossible (taken to its
extremes).
You wrote, "Moreover, I don't think most
postmodernist
writers deliberately try to be unclear. But they do,
by virtue of the nature of their ideas, try to be
unfamiliar--and that makes them difficult." Where,
then, is the line between babbling inanely attempting
to appear lucid, and foggying the boundaries of the
"known" in order to teach others to reach for new
thoughts and ideas? To deliberately obscure, seems to
be equivalent to deliberately trying NOT to
communicate at all.
I do hope you post on this.
(other stuff was here, but only time will tell if it
rang true or not -- (Go Kucinich!)
------------------
Welcome to the discussion...
HH =)
6 comments:
And below is my second email response. I'll follow up later.
For the most part, I agree
with Ron. I've never read Deleuze or Guttari, but, as Ron said, they're probably trying to "reimagine" (i.e. 'deconstruct') the world rather than define it.
Criticizing postmodern writing for being unclear is a little like criticizing science for not being
sufficiently paradoxical or artistic.
The assumption that Dawkins makes is that the objectives of science can go unquestioned and be used
as a measure by which to determine the value of all other methods of thought and discourse. Put another
way, Dawkins is assuming that all methods of thought strive for producing scientific knowledge--knowledge that
can be quantified and practically used. But that isn't the kind of knowledge that artists and some postmodern philosophers are trying to produce (I touched on this
in my last blog post). So the criticism entirely misses the point.
My own objection to science is not one based on its efficiency. No doubt that science is the best method available for producing scientific knowledge. But, in
a perfect world (or even a moderately sane one), I have a feeling that science would be looked on as an amusing toy that would eventually fall into disuse, be left on the ground to be covered by dust and forgotten. In other words, I'm questioning the VALUE
of science. And I sometimes question the value of postmodernism, too. That's a worthwhile debate to have. Debating whether postmodernism is sufficiently scientific and vice versa, though, is pointless.
Sorry I deleted the first comment. The typo in the first paragraph was driving me crazy.
This is an interesting topic, and I plan to get back to it when I have more time.
I am just beginning to look into pm philosophy. I found an erudition of the "rhizome" issue that Ron talked about here:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/deleuze.html
Having read it. I must say that I am perplexed. It seems that Deleuze & Guattari are articulating an epistemology that includes the concept that epistemology-formation is impossible. Seems self-contradictory to me.
I got the impression that they are saying that language can be divorced, somehow from the humans who use it. They write, "There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil. It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only be decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence." It seems eloquent and metaphorical, but (in the same breath) nonsensical as hell (especially the last sentence).
The more I read, it seemed the more the rhizome concept began to appear like and explanatory fiction, of which, the authors attempt to re-humunculize our minds by calling a "process" (albeit a damned vaccuuous one) an entity.
Another example of this is "territorialization" and its counter "deterritorilization." For example: "The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen." -- Essentially they are "inferring" the non-lanugage based adaptation as a function of these two mental "processes." But it seems to me that they have"multiplied entities beyond necessity" (to borrow from Occam). All they can truly say is that the orchid and wasp are interdependant based upon a mutually beneficial, and highly robust cooperative, and functional set of morphological and behavioral changes. The ethereal leap into the "minds" of the orchid and wasp have not been substantiated in any way.
If Dawkins was overly-simplistic then it appears to me that Deleuze and Guattari were overly complicating.
As my scientific "father" once wrote, "If all linkages in explanatory chain account for the phenomena adequately, then nothing is gained by adding a supposed non-physical link." (yes, this was BF Skinner). That is NOT over-reductionism, that appears to me to be parsimony.
I have a few books on order (pro and con PM). This has been a bit long-winded, but it is really peaking my curiosity.
I look forward to your responses.
HH =)
Travis,
You raise several issues that pique my curiosity. One, "re-humunculize our minds by calling a "process" (albeit a damned vaccuuous one) an entity." So, you are nervous that the processes described, the rhizome or langauge becomes an identity? Is your primary concern that we then take away human agency? You seem to get at this earlier when you say the Deleuze et. al create an epistemology that doesn't allow for epistmological creation. Again, I'm interested, and again it seems you are concerned with human agency.
But maybe you wouldn't call it human agency but rather human ability to understand the world through the scientific process. I can empathize with this concern. Still, for me pm is useful in that it opens up opportunities to imagine the world and its process in seemingly unimaginable ways. To me this has value. The rhizomatic metaphor works against the modernist meta-narrative of linearity and progress.
And, I agree with Wittgenstein, that language creates limits. I think you too easily dismiss him not that I'm a Wittgenstein expert, but I do know that he is foundational for social-constructivists and postmodernists, for the very important move to deconstruct language as a container filled with bias, kitsch, and anachronisms.
And then you accuse pm of diluting and changing language without cause. Sure, it pm does do this sometimes--it has its extremes like any theory--but you *seem* to grant that language, before anyone gets ahold of it, is diluted. You speak of language as if it is prestine and untouched until pm begin messing with it.
So, my question for you: do you really believe this? Do you believe that language is objective? That language always means what we think it means? (I know you hate religious and patriotic rhetoric which plays off this notion of language). And how if language is corrupted by these folks is it not also corrupted by scientists (and all the other invested parties in the scientific project)?
I will give you that we can't then give up, not use language or not continue to run flawed experiments shaped by flawed language. But if we never step back, using tools such as pm, then we will never gain insight into the mistakes of language. To me this is a correcting mechanism (pm) that science should want. It doesn't mean one takes over they over but they work together, albeit often apart, in order to create a more robust system of thought.
As Shane pointed out I think, Science can really get it wrong. I'm currently reading Jabari Asim's *The N Word* where he outlines the historical use and context of the N word. Part of this discussion is the scientific studies done to demonstrate (e.g. cranium size) a hierarchy of race. Science supported racism for centuries even into the 20th century. And, because history repeats itself and because I'm confident we are not that much better that those living in the 19th century, there must be ways in which science is now wrong.
Of course I do not mean wrong in a "normal" way in which the scientific method will correct the misconceptions, but wrong in the bigger sense--the epistemological, metaphorical, langauge sense. And these wrongs, in part, will need to be righted by interrogations of language, without which science will just keep getting it wrong because they are working within the confines of assumed langauge.
In Time, Love and Memory by the author, Weiner, explores a scientist's (Benzer) work to demonstrate memory in fruit flies. I don't have the book, as I'm in Rexburg, so I can't cite specific examples. But I can say that Weiner clearly demonstrates how important discoveries are delayed because of the personalities and early experiences of otherwise brilliant scientists. Many of the scientists work out of a partiular frame (which is partially, of course, constructed through langauge) which they can not see out of.
Ok, I will stop. I guess I got going there for a minute. Now, I want to pull the Time, Love Memory book off the shelf.
Based on the out-of-context quotations you've given here, HH, I would agree that there's an unnecessary lack of clarity in Deleuze' & Guattari's writing. I reserve the right to change my mind about that comment, though, after I've read more.
But I'm not backing off of my initial statement about the need for writing that is unclear by dint of its unfamiliarity, nor am I saying that "we use [or should use] words [exclusively] to convey meaning", as you put it. Sometimes it's necessary to "deconstruct" meaning, and that's what some postmodernists are trying to do. And by doing so I think they call into question the value of the meaning-search; they suggest that "meaning" falsely limits or reifies experience; they attempt to redefine or create a more useful concept for human knowledge. And I support that endeavor.
Granted, I don't think that endeavor calls for deliberate obfuscation. But I don't think writers like Sartre or Foucoult are unnecessarily difficult. They are difficult, though. Same goes, I think, for Derrida and same goes for novelists, poets, and playwrites like Joyce, Pynchon, Becket, Eliot, Pinter, and so on.
This goes back to what I said earlier about wanting to reframe the debate so to focus on the VALUE of the postmodern and the scientific endeavor as opposed to quibbling over which endeavor satisfies the objectives of the other.
I might initiate that debate in a future blog post!!
PS: HH wrote:
"The more I read, it seemed the more the rhizome concept began to appear like and explanatory fiction, of which, the authors attempt to re-humunculize our minds by calling a "process" (albeit a damned vaccuuous one) an entity."
Re-humunculize? Are you inventing words here? Are you calling an entity (humunculis) a process (humunculize)? You god damn postmodernists think you can use language in whatever way you please, don't you? (smirk smirk) ;)
OH the Irony of it all!! Wiseass! ;)
I have a great deal of reading to do, then I will respond to the both of you.
As a quick response, Ron, no I am not afraid of losing free will, because I think freedom is an illusion. The humunculus was the result of Cartesian dualism. The "little man in the mind" as central controller (read cognitivistic meta-processor here as well). The likes of Hume and his ilk dispensed with dualism quite nicely.
However, I get the impression, thus far (and I reserve the right to change my mind as my understanding accumulates) that post modernism is trying to make language their ethereal Cartesian humunculus. But I will delve deeper sooner.
And, yeah, you damned PM appear to think that language can be used any damned way you please. ;)
End snark,
HH =)
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