To think you clever lot can explain postmodernism

[FlamedToACrisp]

I've just come across postmodernism, and I can't get my head around it at all.

What am I to understand of sentences like: "Such reality as there is, according to postmodernists, is a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language." (Encyclopedia Britannica) ?

If we reject the idea of reality, what does that leave? I mean, what's the point? Our 'reality' is experienced by us as real on every level, and, barring The Matrix or similar, surely it walks like a duck?

Is it just a load of pretentious bollocks, or have I missed an important point?

Apologies, my interpretation of post modernism is probably not based on an understanding of actual post modernism. It is based in the impression I get from acquaintances and friends of friends who chuck the word around.
The explanation given earlier on thread about taking bits from different schools of thought is interesting. Is there not a danger though that this becomes can slip into endlessly deconstructing and recycling old ideas to prove whatever is desired that day, at the expense of exploring new ideas?

@florascotia2

In so far as I understand it, scentific/mathematical concepts such as Einstein's special theory of relativity also contributed to the development of postmodernism. In the early 20th cent, Einstein's ideas caused quite a stir in cultural as well as scientific circles.

Einstein's theory showed, for example, that "Two events, simultaneous for one observer, may not be simultaneous for another observer if the observers are in relative motion"

There is also the famous Schrodinger's cat 'thought experiment''.

Interesting brief article here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/05/did-quantum-physics-lead-to-postmodernism/340795/

Any Mumsnet mathematicians/physicists around to say more?

I'm a mere chemist but I'd say this demonstrates the dangers of scientific illiterates extrapolating from things they don't understand.

Postmodernism isn’t really a view in some disciplines: the more accurate way to explain “the postmodern” is (in philosophy at least) a description of the world post Modernity.
Modernity was about reason triumphing over faith, progress, industrialisation, enlightenment, ethics based on understanding the human, rather than as derived from religion and - in philosophy - putting “Man” first (ie “mankind”).
So, after modernity there is no longer a belief in unlimited human progress and so on.
The narratives that made sense of big political etc changes (eg Marxism) have not worked and we are left without overarching “truth” and are in a more fragmented and compartmentalised world, where specialisms are the norm in knowledge and practice, rather than being like an “enlightenment man”.
And then there are various thinkers who try to determine what next for humanity/reason/knowledge.
Postmodern”ism” is NOT about people having subjective or different views on things/people although lots of thinkers mistakenly attribute an inevitable relativism in morality/ethics/law to “postmodernists” when in fact “postmodernists” were describing the situation with knowledge as ALREADY being relativistic and they were trying to get past that unhelpful state.
Hope that makes sense

Errol Obviously, I can't say that it's a 'fact', but it was a phenomenon widely commented on at the time (1930s, especially) that scientific ideas about the relative nature of observed reality DID influence cultural thought, art etc. In 1935, a group of artists calling themselves the 'Dimesnionists' issued a manifesto about it - you can read it here www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/DM%2520Translation%2520library%2520case.pdf In that manifesto they specifically refer to Einstein as an inspiration.

They might not have understood the science or the maths, but they were certainly excited by (ironically enough) their own perception of it.
There was an exhibition of Dimensionist work only last year. Review and illustrations here: www.csmonitor.com/Science/2019/0404/From-Einstein-to-Duchamp-the-physics-of-modern-art

If I remember correctly Schrodinger was trying to highlight the absurdity of the new field of quantum physics when he came up with the cat analogy!
He was not saying that a cat could both exist and not exist: he was using it as an example of a paradox. Taking a line of thinking to an extreme to highlight the ridiculous nature of it.

The amazing physicists at the forefront of quantum physics did not just sit around imagining things (although they were astoundingly creative people). They were trying to explain real life physical phenomena often using very advanced mathematics. They were also often deeply uncomfortable with their own conclusions. (This is the beautiful thing about truly great scientists: They accept that it doesn't matter if they like the results or not. This is what it means to genuinely seek the truth and is the opposite of "reality is what you want it to be").

I do not understand quantum physics because I do not speak the language required well enough: maths.

Problem is it all sounds so "cool" that some of the concepts and terms have been misused and twisted to say all kinds of things about unrelated topics. Eg, I have seen quacks talk about the "quantum resonance of crystals" to prove that a lump of quartz can cure liver disease. Which is plainly bollocks.

Good point, Krazynights The 'Dimensionists' I mentioned might be seen as a good example of Modernism, challenging and shattering old certainties. As you say, postmodernism followed.

Postmodernism was a part of my degree at university... I remember everyone looking at each other thinking, WTF?! Luckily it was only for one term. Hardest dissertation I've ever written!

Squishy I think one might perhaps say something rather similar about art and literature of the same era as your quantum physicists. Artists'/writers' search for imaginative truth or 'meaning' was often deeply uncomfortable, to them and to others.

Posted too soon. Sorry. meant to say that some of them were, of course, also just being 'cool' and following the latest intellectural fashions, like your crystal healer.

It's far too simplistic to draw direct parallels of course, but thought-provoking.

At the end of the 19th century, so many amazing discoveries and leaps had been made that many naively thought they were just a few steps away from understanding pretty much everything (and therefore being able to make accurate predictions).
Ie scientific determinism.
But there were a few phenomena that did not make sense with what was understood at the time (eg, the ultraviolet paradox: if light was really a wave, then putting this together with what was known about energies and frequencies etc then sitting in front of a candle should burn your face off raiders of the lost ark style. But this demonstrably was not so.)
It was in trying to solve these mysteries that the new fields of physics developed, along with the realisation that there is an inherent uncertainty at the quantum scale. (So no perfectly accurate weather forecasts!)
But those scientists did not just think up cool ideas, there was a lot of hard graft including physical experiments, observable results and mathematical proofs.

But that is just my very patchy understanding of the subject. I have a physics background but work as an engineer and have never studied quantum mechanics in depth.

@SquishySquirmy, your post certainly resonated with me.
Some time ago I did (just for interest) an OU course on the 19C novel and some (in fact most) of the essays of lit. crit. that we were required to read were written in such torturous language, I would have to read a paragraph several times in order to work out what the author was trying to say. I consider myself quite adequately literate but sometimes just gave up.

They were often written from a 1970s/80s feminist viewpoint, which obviously gave them plenty to get exercised about when applied to novels such as Jane Eyre or Madame Bovary.

I did often wonder (as per the pp on ‘Grievance studies‘ hoaxes) whether any peer reviewer had actually read and understood them, or had merely deduced that a complete lack of anything resembling plain English must mean they were worth publishing!

(I did manage a very good result for that course anyway 🙂)

florascotia2
Sorry I didn't mean to put writers and artists down at all - it is of course true that many confront uncomfortable (and even unpopular) truths.
My worry is that at the moment there is a danger of a sort of cult like thinking in some academic circles where people DON'T want to voice uncomfortable thoughts, or ask questions which could be considered "problematic".
If it is possible to use clever language to prove whatever you want, then the temptation will be to decide the answer first and the questions second. Which results in a sort of positive feedback loop of clever, highly articulate people backing each other's arguments up but which does not actually advance anything.

I guess the discussion itself shows what a tricky and difficult topic it is.

Squishy Thanks for saying that. But I didn't really think you were being critical of the artists etc. And I also agreed with the earlier scientific poster who said, correctly, that some people use complex and advanced scientific concepts without understanding them. In most cases, like the crystal healer you mentioned, that's not good. Occasionally, as with some artists, it can, however, be an inspiration.

I also agree very much when you say that there is a real danger of language becoming an end in itself, divorced from content or - very difficult word - meaning.
Politically, as well as scientifically or academically, that is so dangerous...

@SquishySquirmy I'm following your comments with great interest - that candle thing is intriguing!

All very interesting - I am getting flashbacks to La Difference...and Lacan

I thought pm was a response to modernism - particularly concerning language and that language is not fixed and cannot be viewed as so therefore reality as described by language cannot be a complete truth - the vehicle used to describe it is not perfect therefore the reality 'described' cannot be.

This has all sorts of implications for ideas, thinking, communication and really was an attempt to address fully the role of context in a given situation - how you see something varies from how I see based upon our differences.

I thought that modernism showed how we have severed our link to the world of morality and truth - the great modernists Stravinsky, Joyce & Picasso were all about conveying ideas through different forms as they felt those new forms (chaotic, conflicting, dissonant, stream of consciousness) better reflected the chaos of the early 20 th century (war, essentially).

It is really interesting to study the early Paris salons and then look at things 'Through a Looking Glass, cracked' and see what they were getting at - the idea was if they could get such new contemporary 'forms' through to high society, society would be forced to confront the violence and chaos that existed outside of their genteel world. It also provided a paradigmatic shift in language that the old order were not in control of so the narrative could be set and controlled by the artists - this was new and liberating.

Postmodernism to me has built on that but as people have pointed out has moved so far in to meta meta territory that it has ignored deliberately the material/physical. Nowhere is this more apparent (and more stupid) than where we now have people who just seem to refuse to acknowledge materiality in any form to the point that they will discuss books with me that they have not read and instead just argue with everything I say because of what I represent to them in a kind of 'she likes it therefore I will take an intellectual position that is everything she isn't. I think that is why we are so tied up in knots - it also comes from the intellectual, European left and was a counter-response to the commercialisation of society after the war ( I thought).

I did my thesis on Joyce and spent a lot of time in this world and am now in support of the shift from the epistemological approach to an ontological one for data as I think it allows us to recognise materiality fully which then truly allows us to address context.

But maybe I 'm wrong.

Basically, look upon everything with an infuriating wry smile. Relativism is king, nothing matters. A tedious, self perpetuating spiral towards the navel. "This is my truth, tell me yours". It's a hollow way of approaching art, literature and life in general. Imagine discovering a previously isolated tribe in the Amazonian rainforest, napalming their village, then creating an almost perfect re-enactment of it to be preserved and studied inperpituity. The creation of the simulacra. Meaning becomes meaningless, but meaning is derived from it's meaningless. Hmmm. Clearly, I'm a fan. :-/

@serenada

people who just seem to refuse to acknowledge materiality in any form to the point that they will discuss books with me that they have not read and instead just argue with everything I say because of what I represent to them in a kind of 'she likes it therefore I will take an intellectual position that is everything she isn't.

So do you think these people are sincere in their beliefs, or has the whole thing become a kind of parlour game with clever-clever points to be scored?

@MadameEdam just as I thought I was getting the hang of it, you come along and confuse me again!

@FreiasBathtub

I'm going to say Option A, pretentious bollocks, but possibly I am also just missing an important point.

I was always baffled about it during my History degree and clearly remembered saying at my Oxbridge interview 'but the Battle of Hastings HAPPENED?' They let me in so clearly had some sympathy with this point of view.

As I understand it, in history it sort of grew out of literary criticism and the idea that a reader cannot interpret authorial intent, as they are by default going to be reading in a way that's shaped by their own understanding. And lots of Derrida and Foucault writing about language and power maybe? And then, as academics are sometimes wont to do, everyone got very excited and wanted to see how far they could push the idea before it, or their discipline, broke.

I think that this all makes sense as an explanation and therefore I just conclude that it is almost certainly wrong.

Thanks for this thread OP, it's cheered up my nightly battle with a teething toddler!

No-one, postmodernist included, would want to deny actual events, which suggests to me that you don't have a very good understanding of postmodernism (also Oxbridge here before you get on your high horse). It is the discourse ABOUT such events which is in question. To take your example, was this foreign invasion, rightful succession, or just a spat between the upper classes which didn't have much impact for ordinary people or some time? All the foregoing oversimplified for brevity.

@FlamedToACrisp

I haven't quite figured it all out but the moment people start talking about books they haven't read, I am suspicious.

I suspect that many have been taught some very simplistic ideas about critical theory and haven't touched Lyotard, Levi Strauss, Saussure, etc.

I keep hearing Foucault, Gramsci, Adorno - all very left but they are not the full picture (certainly not in my degree).

A good example would be a conversation I had at an academic event - a guy I was talking to was being quite arrogant and dominating the conversation and said that all art was redundant after Warhol, including music. I said so why did John Cale keep recording then? (big VU fan, me) . When he realised I knew about music he then tried to twist it around and say that Cale was the finest postmodernist and had killed music with his work and that nothing had been recorded since that mattered. I tried to talk about Eno, Glass,etc but he then did this thing that I have noticed with guys recently where by he acts as though he's bored of my company now and intellectually needs to 'move on' to someone more stimulating. Complete sixth form drama.

At that point I realised he was f*ing clueless and that all the wine had run out so I thought feck this and left.

@toconclude

It is the discourse ABOUT such events which is in question.

Absolutely - spot on.

But I am meeting a lot of masters students who are touching on these ideas in digital humanities, visual critical studies, etc and they are really struggling with this. I think it is because their undergrads haven't prepared them - art based courses where they have no real analyticla, written component perhaps? I don't know but their grasp and general knowledge is very thin and they have gripped on to something that I would describe more as a critique of a piec of art from what they think is a pm stance rather than understood pm as a response, in and of itself.

[quote FlamedToACrisp]@Love51 I see you're way ahead of me on the law thing - let me know if it works!

Your mention of the individual interpretation of a novel reminded me of a piece of art I saw at the Tate Modern. I forget the name of the installation, but it was basically a shed which had been blown up by some soldiers, then all the parts were collected and suspended on thin wires around a huge bright bulb... as we walked around it, our shadows joined the other shadows and our presence created a unique artwork which only we could perceive.[/quote]
That was 'Exploded', IIRC.

Took DD1 round one summer holiday and tapped into my inner Art Teacher. By the time I was showing her a concrete bench that looked like a concreate bench, but if you followed the outline with your hand, you made aeroplanes like you did as a kid, we'd acquired about five people discreetly following as listening.

She went on to do a Fine Arts degree. Serves me right, really. She's now fluent in Arty Wankspeak.

@MadameEdam

See, I think it has become that but originally did reflect something more substantial - particularly in language. Joyce was trying to address this in Ulysses with stream of consciousness and highlighting that language is owned by the speakers and used in a way unique to them and that the fomal rules do not always elucidate meaning fully when spoken by some people - we have local expressions which perfectly highlight this. Language is actually an organic process that we can apply some formal rules to (ususally written - grammar, etc) but if you are an artist writing a book and trying to build a character then trying to recreate their true voice is better (From Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting). The authentic voice of the characters is much more appropriate and sometimes can be better used to set a scene from that perspective, rather than using the formality of a narrator in standard English.

I also think it is used wider to convey that there are multiple views of an event, etc and to try and get rid of this idea of ethnocentricity? So, the war in Europe could be seen as a victorious moment in history by Americans, for example, but actually was seen as a humiliating defeat by the Germans. In this respect, we are talking about language used as propaganda and the national narrative (usually media orientated)

So, post modernism was saying that this multiplicity exists within language - like the distorted views in a cracked glass - all accurate in an ontological sense - they are as true a reflection as a non cracked or whole view - just perhaps not the ideal we look for but authentically true nevertheless.

Regarding visual culture I thought that the poppies at Windsor were very interesting. The art world is indiscriminate in its audience and I thought the success of the poppies exhibit was exactly because of its ambiguity. At that time, the newspapers were full of stories about immigrants, there was a feeling of change that seemed to some as a 'threat', I think and a British, war spirit was being evoked in the Dalily Mail, etc. To me a suggestion was being made to the public, framed a certain way that left it up to them to fill in the gaps. I think a lot of people looked at the exhibition and saw Mosley's River of Blood speech - the field of poppies at different layers looking simultaneously like a field of flowers swaying in the breeze could also be 'read' as a river of red blood.

Does that make sense? That in identifying the multiplicitious nature of art we have at the same time created a space where people now project their own ideas on to what is essentially a neutral object? And post modernism 'facilitates' this

My understanding of postmodernism is that it (as mentioned by a pp) is a response to the historical 'grand narratives' in philosophy , politics, and to a degree, science, pushing against concepts of material realism, the enlightenment and the possibility of knowledge .

A postmodernist might say that we are essentially limited by our language, and constrained in our understanding of anything by the limits of our ability to describe it . Also , because no individual can have an experience which will be the same as any other individual's experience, the possibility of knowledge - of real, fundamental truth - cannot exist. Ergo there is no truth , no objective reality .

It is closely liked to decosntrctionist theory.

While I understand the value in postmodern theory to a degree and enjoy some postmodernist art, I do worry that the tentacles of postmodernist thought have infiltrated contemporary discourse and thinking in very unhelpful ways.

I believe (as I think most people believe) in the fact of objective material realities that exist outside of interpretation, and are true irrespective of language. For example that an unsupported object on earth will fall down (gravity). That 2 + 2 = 4. That if you stand in the rain you get wet. While postmodernism can help with exploring narratives and the reason why certain interpretations of sociological structures to historical events may be held up as 'the truth' , I am not on board with using it for deconstructing what I would consider immutable truths about material reality. I think that could be quite harmful as it can undermine the possibility of knowledge and the use of a fixed language structure (which we need for laws, medicine, science etc.)

Also I'm not sure about the postmodernist view of history - does PM say that there literally is no objectively factual version of history , or does it just say that it is unknowable? Because I do believe that irrespective of what may be known - there is an objective truth as to what actually happened/happens. I appreciate one cannot necessarily put objective moral values on those facts - that may always be subjective. But the bare facts of what happened are 'true' - irrespective of perspective or knowledge.