Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "Postmodernism: WTF? An introduction to Postmodernist Theory | Tom Nicholas" video.

  1. Postmodernism formally arrived in 1961 with the publication of Michel Foucault's "History of Madness" (in the Age of Enlightenment); 61 years ago. Despite some initial success Pomo does not influence Western Philosophy, and we rarely hear about it from actual philosophers except when they dis' it. Yet pomo is firmly entrenched in Academia within various far left 'theory' disciplines. Where we find: Feminism, Queer studies, Transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, Anti-colonialism, Film Studies, media studies, leftisms, ... there we also always find pomo. Hand and glove. Pomo gives these disciplines or studies credibility. Most ideas from such 'studies' lack good empirical support; but pomo can legitimise them as Big Ideas! Ideas instead. Ideas which explain the world to the students of such 'studies'. The very "cultural logic of Western society", to cite Nicholas. The 'theorists' who teach such lefty studies never develop new pomo ideas. They use pomo as a weapon against their critics. Pomo is epistemically relativist; which means: it promotes skepticism of truth claims. Pomos say 'truth is myth', in the Foucauldian, and Derridean senses. 1. From Foucault we hear that 'truth' is established by regimes of power, and is used by such regimes of power to establish domination over us. So 'truth' is a tool of 'power'. 2. From the Derridean side, they tell us that every meaning associated with a sign (such as 'racism', for example) gets its meaning from a network of other signs; from the meanings of those signs which denote or connote 'racism'. Given people from different ethnicities, sexes, cultures, and identities disagree of the meaning of some signs, no two people are likely to give the same meaning for 'racism'. So there's no irreducible, stable, meaning to 'truth'. And many meanings are contested. As I already said, philosophers long ago refuted both these points made by pomo (above). But the modern academy is an istitution where academics don't need to listen to critics of their ideas. For example climate alarmists, say, non-alarmism is 'denialism', and they refuse to debate or listen to 'deniers'. That such 'deniers' cannot be allowed a platform to speak. The modern academy turned itself into a machine to manufacture bias and closed-mindedness. Q: Yet, given pomo is intellectually vacuous, why is Michel Foucalt now the most cited author in the humanities? A: Dispite its wrongness, pomo still does a job, or two. Pomo gives one a license: 1) to speculate. Pomos gives one a set of academically 'respectable' ideas to cite: books and papers. For example, one of these pomo 'masters' (Foucault) is cited more than anyone else in the humanities. Peter Boghossian calls 'idea laundering' the practice of getting a junk idea published in an academic journal and then having your friends and allies cite your publication in support of their own junk ideas. Furthermore, the production of vacuous speculation, founded on previous speculation is now a career path within academia. 2) to disregard one's critics and their evidence; and to celebrate closed minds and bias. "Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice" - Stephen Hicks: "Expllaining Postmodernism", in the chapter "Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence". Citations: 1. Idea laundering: https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492 2. "Expllaining Postmodernism" - free audio book! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQcNjHNXnEE, narated by its author 3. epistemically relativist: https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/epistemic-relativism/v-2
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  2. Micro-physics of Power - a floating signifier? Foucault's landmark 'text' (AKA: 'book', to you) was published in 1961: "Madness and Civilization". Derrida's différance arrived on the scene in 1967 (in book form); he coined the term in 1963. In these last 6 decades academia has been pontificating poststructuralism at us. Yet how have they developed and elaborated their pomo ideas? They have not. Let us compare. Take, say, narcissitic personality disorder. One can't quite quantify it, but one can do tests to tell oneself whether one is 'suffering' from it. Or, more realistically - whether other people are suffering from you. So we know it's a thing. It's elaborated and can be diagnosed. How did postmodern sociologists further elaborate their central Foucauldian concept: 'the micro-physics of power'? [Discipline and Punish, 1975]. They haven't. 47 years after it arrived in academia, countless PhDs later, the term is as woolly and ill-defined today, as when Foucault invented it. This is the essential weakness in Leftist "theory", and "theoretical work". It's all speculation: metaphor and similie piled on top of narrative and parable; stories. The term: 'floating signifier', was widely used in poststructuralist semiotics by 1980. It means a sign which has been emptied of meaning by its use in so many contexts such that the meaning is overloaded and exhausted. A bit like a linguistic version of 'how long is a piece of string?'. Q: How much of pomo is simply 'floating signifiers'? A: Nearly all of it.
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