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 faith plays, 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, I have 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. I will 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 of equally 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 I then; 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 new history. These are powerful, often exciting expansions of our critical and interpretive faculties. Unfortunately, the postmodernist wave doesnt stop there, where it belongs, and where it makes a real contribution.

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 notentirely-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 most sincerely 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 on some 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, sometimes absurd misapplication of postmodernist notions to hard science, but one well-known example 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 in science, 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 is correct, 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 critics decry 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.

One frequently quoted criticism is made along these lines by Dick Hebdige in Hiding 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 cultural hierarchies to the disillusionments of aging Baby Boomers to TV commercials Hebdige concludes that, if everything is 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