The rationalists say that a major purpose of language is to communicate facts about the world.

The postmodernists say: "What are 'facts'? What is 'world'?"

So with facts gone and the real world gone, that leaves only one purpose for language, for saying anything at all: to get others to do what you want them to do. (This is a simplification of Wittgenstein's "language-games" of the form of e.g., the Builders' Game.)

I've always maintained that Derridean postmodernism is, in actuality, a form of long-form trolling whose main purpose was to provoke traditional philosophers by baffling them or getting them to fruitlessly debate the propositions. In this it's sort of a language-game: Derrida produced words, and the philosophers reacted in just the way he intended them to when he wrote the words. Whether it was for his own amusement, to show those stiff-necked rationalists that they're not immune to cognitive or deductive traps, or whatever -- who knows? But the interesting bit is that trolling survives as a valid intention for Derrida to produce the philosophy he did, whether or not he took his own propositions seriously (though if he did, he would have to consider whether the academics he was trolling existed just in his own head).

> So with facts gone and the real world gone, that leaves only one purpose for language, for saying anything at all: to get others to do what you want them to do.

And now we have a regime in the United States that has downright weaponized this posture.

Indeed. It's distressing how this tactic can be (and is) employed by all sorts of unhinged extremists, from radical postmodernists to Trump and his cronies.

Being an obscurantist is apparently a great strategy if you want to fool and exploit people. Would that it weren't so damn effective. :/

I upvoted you, but I also felt compelled to leave a more substantive response to your comment:

Brav-fucking-o.

Since you seem keen on the idea of shining a light on liars and abusive pedagogues, you'll no doubt enjoy this (now-ancient, from 2005!) piece of criticism from the late Christopher Hitchens published in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/books/review/transgressing...

My word, do we need clever critics now more than ever. D:

Well, picking on Derrida's philosophy is like picking on Rob Liefeld's art, or the crazy 90s hair your wife had in her yearbook photos: everybody pretty much now agrees that it was bad, and that we were a little crazy when it was in fashion.

  > I've always maintained that Derridean postmodernism is,
  > in actuality, a form of long-form trolling […]

I disagree. I don't think it's coincidence that postmodernism arose where and when it did; it is precisely suited to exonerate France's ‘performance’ in WWII.

I am not sure that Derrida invented the form; I get the impression that he was responding to structuralists on their own terms.

In other words like a good troll. A good troll knows their audience and is intimately familiar with that audience's strongly-held beliefs, so they can refute them with arguments that may or may not be sound, but seem plausible enough at first glance, so that the audience will get good and mad when the troll seemingly yanks the rug out from under them.

Surely the purpose of language is to get published?

>Worse, if Derrida really believed what he said, why write a paper or give a talk anyway? It's not like his readers or hearers were going to understand him, so why bother?

All of those being things Derrida himself has answered in his work.

So it's kind of like when a new scientific paper is posted on Reddit and within ten minutes somebody with no relation to the field at all (and who haven't even read the paper, at least not carefully) is sure to have spotted some trivial errors that he is sure the 10 PhDs that have studied the field for ages haven't thought of.

But has he answered them? Or has he merely written down some syntactical symbols in order?

It's a tough one.

Well, you'll have to make your own interpretation of them.

But this also holds for anything you write as well.

It's not like laughing at it makes it any less true.

I'm not really laughing at it. I'm pointing out that it's self-contradictory. Or if you prefer, applied to itself, it destroys itself. I prefer that things I think are true not refute themselves.

[Edit: coldtea (or anyone else), if you think I'm wrong, feel free to try to state Derrida's position in a way that does not destroy itself, and we can argue about it.]

Based on past experience, we are not likely to see any enlightenment from that source, merely more insinuations that we are too dumb to appreciate the Emperor's wardrobe, with, perhaps, some vacuous tautologies.

Actually, there is an idea that has been floating around other threads here, that Derrida sought to destroy structuralism by turning its own methods on it, thereby exposing its self-contradictions. If so, then he only speaks to those who are already engaged with structuralism - hence my comment elsewhere about closed self-referentiality. I have no idea whether this was his intent, but the thing is, it works anyway.

Thank you. When going to the source (Derrida, et al), one gets the sense that deconstructionists have absolutely no desire to enlighten, educate, edify, or indeed provide any value at all to the reader/student.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The disdain and desire to confound oozes right off the page.

>one gets the sense that deconstructionists have absolutely no desire to enlighten, educate, edify, or indeed provide any value at all to the reader/student.

That's because they are not supposed to be mentors and they don't deal with students (except nominally, in their academic capacity). They deal with adults.

I haven't yet used this Unicode codepoint, standardized in Unicode 9, but I don't think a better opportunity will present itself for a premiere, so:

EDIT: oh my god, HN filters out emoji codepoints, how utterly barbaric.

Anyway, it was going to be this dude: http://emojipedia.org/rolling-on-the-floor-laughing/

I, for one, find your position here to be inarguable, but Marazan's comment is nevertheless trenchantly amusing.