I think there basically was a crisis in philosophy, most sane and interesting perspectives had already been explored. Western Europa had almost self-destructed in the first half 20th century. France, Great Britain lost almost all of the rest of their empires right when post modernism developed. Many intellectuals were permanently high on one substance or another.

It isn't super surprising that someone like Lacan, who wrote incomprehensible gibberish, laced with spurious references to advanced concepts from pure mathematics like algebraic topology, became an idol in such a climate.

Basically I think it is time to recognise that baby boomer philosophers produced tons of intellectual garbage. They have been in positions of power in the philosophy and social science departments for the last few decades. Their "Marsch durch die Institutionen" (march through the institutions) is complete. Turns out they were far less competent and talented overall than the people they rebelled against.

The brilliant and sane philosophy of the 19th century can't be disconnected from the insane and tragic events of the 20th century.

It seems like the only logical thing was to try something very different and question really basic assumptions. I would be genuinely fascinated to hear about a better alternative course that keeps in mind the situation they were in and the role of plenty of philosophers in bringing them there.

Here's a story.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it.

Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness.

And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table.

And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything.

You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle.

You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...

I wish I could draw more attention to this comment. Thank you for writing and sharing this!

It's because they identified genuine problems and self-contradictions in the preceding traditions. That was a big deal. It was a resurgence of skepticism, but one which brought a new kind of analysis, inspired by Nietzsche and (less obviously) Freud, about how people convince themselves of things which they don't actually know, for reasons that are different from the ones they claim, and reveal all of this by contradicting themselves in interesting ways.

> they identified genuine problems and self-contradictions in the preceding traditions

Could you give examples of some of the problems and self-contradictions that postmodernism identified?

The most important lesson for literary criticism, as far as I (very vaguely) remember, was an emphasis on intertextuality, which downplayed the role of individual author (Barthes' "death of the author"), and thus downplayed authority of the author. It may be one way of looking at things; although not particularly productive and known to previous literary scholars, especially those who had been studying folklore.

> inspired most of all by Nietzsche

The will to power, you mean? Is there a textual link between Nietzsche and the founders of postmodernism?

The death of the author became a fashionable trope but it wasn't the central idea—more a corollary.

The postmodernists worshipped Nietzsche; he was their lodestar. (There are many textual links, but I'm a long way out of grad school—someone else will have to provide them). If you think of Foucault's concentration on the topic of power, that's entirely in the Nietzschean line. The postmodernists were mostly following through on the explosion that Nietzsche and Freud wrought on Western ideas of rationality and objectivity.

I started writing a comment about this when I saw the thread, but could feel it starting to turn into more of an essay, and that's not a good thing at 3am. I remember going to see Derrida when he came to Stanford shortly after 9/11. It was impossible to understand a single thing he was saying—I have a funny story about that for another time. (Edit: turns out I posted it years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341350)

And yet...for all the obscurantism and bullshit, the Sokal hoax and everything else—I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.

The real problem with the postmodernists is not that their texts are full of ornate bullshit (look up the story about Searle asking Foucault why he can't just write straightforwardly, and Foucault saying no one in Paris would take him seriously if he did). The real problem is that their program is only negative. Unless I missed it, they never point to anything new.

After deconstructing all the self-contradictory things that humans call knowledge, they have no recommendation for what anybody should actually do. They reach the limits of the human, at which point the only answer is spiritual—but having rejected any possibility of spirit, they end up with nothing. Or, to put it in a different way: deconstruction is fine, but what are you adding? Or another way: criticism, even consummate criticism, isn't enough. (Edit: I found another old comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432)

p.s. I didn't answer your question about examples. It's not so easy to give clear examples, because the postmodern analysis isn't definitive on isolated data points—it's more a preponderance-of-the-evidence thing. Also, it's been a large and unspecified number of years since I worked with this material.

> The postmodernists worshipped Nietzsche; he was their lodestar.

> deconstruction is fine, but what are you adding?

This makes me think that Nietzsche would have despised post-modernism. As if they copied his method but not his intentions.

> And yet...for all the obscurantism and obvious bullshit, the Sokal hoax and everything else—I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.

This is something I deeply agree with. In my interpretation that central topic was essentially Nietzsche's "god is dead" and the following loss of center (both individually and collectively).

But then Jung's answer to those problems are superior in every sense, especially in the context of how to approach it from an individual perspective.

This was not the best written comment, but in many sense I have been significantly disappointed by post-modernism especially because I can see a lot of potential unrealized value in it.

> This makes me think that Nietzsche would have despised post-modernism. As if they copied his method but not his intentions.

Maybe yes, because Nietzsche's real interest was in a positive program. On the other hand, I feel like Nietzsche is more unpredictable and delicate than our image of him. He's quicksilver. If he had continued, he would have gone to unexpected places, so we can't really say.

Foucault in his final years was more interested in a positive program as well. There's a great article (discussed on HN in the past) about Foucault taking LSD in Death Valley with some LA friends, and changing his outlook as a result. Unfortunately he didn't live long enough to do more than leave pointers.

> After deconstructing all the self-contradictory things that humans call knowledge

And yet we proceed, at least in STEM subjects, with the epistemological methods that we trust and that we believe to work, as if postmodernists didn't happen. They may have influenced the politics of science, or the philosophy of science, but they have not changed a thing about how scientific or engineering knowledge is acquired.

It is because early postmodernists found a "Truth". And by that i mean a postmodern version: a reality from their point of view. Their critics of power, art and knowledge were right... Half a century before they made them for physics, and decades ago for biology, but for other fields (except maybe philosophy that turned around a bit before).

This did not take in scientific fields because they did their revolution early XXth century. And while postmodern critics were right, their proposed solution (relativism and/or nihilism) weren't. Everybody now knows that when you have a valid critic, your solution will likely be viewed as "more valid", even though this is absolutely untrue. That's probably what happened in social studies.

Also i follow subects in humanities (history and linguistic, and some consciousness philosophy) and those follow the same epistemological methods. Sadly you can only find the papers in academia and at least in France, know "historians" (TV historian) are not following those methods at all.

ps: The only postmodern i read was foucault, so everything i've said on postmordernist only apply to my understanding of him.

I think that if we could zoom out to a more historical perspective, things would probably look different. History isn't linear and overlapping things are always going on at the same time. The new coexists with the old. It's true that most practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the postmodern critique is without effect. It would be interesting to know who 'wins' a hundred years from now. I wouldn't bet on the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge as we know it today.

> It's true that the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the postmodern critique is without effect.

Are there historical examples when radical philosophical scepticism changed the way science is done? Descartes, with his "evil demon", Hume, the solipsism of George Berkeley — they all have valid points, and they all have pointed out contradictions in things we call knowledge, with sufficient force to have been immortalised in textbooks on the history of philosophy, but they haven't changed the practice of engineering and science, I don't think.

Depends of your definition of science, but historical science definitely changed in the 70s. Was it under the inflence of postmodernists or skeptics? Was it by comparison to other scientific fields? Was it because historian now had real formations?

Hard sciences, I think, are based on the correspondence theory of truth – their statements are tested by whether or not they correspond to what's observed in what's believed to be reality. I realise that for some sciences, such as physics, it's becoming increasingly difficult, with such proposals as string theory or many-world theory. I don't know how much of a reality, apart from physical artifacts, there is in historical science.

The rise of science itself is the leading example.

> I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.

I would be very interested in your thoughts on what the postmodernists touched on that is deeper than their critics.

I wasn't going to answer this because I didn't want to spark the wrong kind of argument in the thread, and because it would take a scary amount of time. But I ran across an old comment where I wrote about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432. Those are still my views.

I would be a little kinder to the postmodernists if I were writing that today. That might be because another 11 years have gone by since I actually had to read them. Memory becomes more like imagination over time, and I'm probably imagining a version of them that I like better.

The important thing is that the things they called fictions and illusions largely are fictions and illusions. They embedded these insights in a nihilistic frame that is ultimately unhelpful, but the contributions are still valuable. It's a bit like seeing how a magic trick works: once you see it, you can't unsee it, and you become able to see the same trick in the future—except in this case the "magic tricks" are rationalizations that humans use to hide things, justify things, pretend things. That phenomenon is challenging to look at and goes much deeper than it appears to. The useful way to work with it, though, is to apply it to oneself.

Although I think we probably agree in most respects, I want to offer a slightly different perspective on some of the points you raised. While it has become a sort of trope to dismiss postmodernist texts as difficult (true) and obscurantist (here I disagree), there is usually a pretty good reason for why these texts are written a certain way. For example, Derrida's writing style is heavily linked to and inspired by the difficulty to pin down the blind spot that he thinks is always part of our metaphysical tradition. If you follow his 'argument' far enough to agree that there is no privileged outside from which we could see this blind spot (since this shift of perspective would then introduce another blind spot), then it absolutely makes sense to adopt his always-shifting, always-destabilizing mode of writing.

In technical fields, we usually expect people to immersive themselves in a particular vocabulary to be able to understand difficult technical books, yet in philosophy we often expect these texts to be readily accessible to laypeople. Why? Derrida's work emerged from a tradition heavily influenced by Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and others, all difficult authors in their own right. Of course we might find it disappointing that these texts are not accessible to the general public in a way that, say, Russell's popular writings were, but isn't that nevertheless an absolutely valid choice on the part of the author?

Also, it should be pointed out that the so called postmodernists were not the first to employ a very difficult writing style that we might on first glance perceive as obscurantist: Heidegger is a good example of someone who coined a ton of neologisms because he thought it necessary to escape the traditional discourse. You might not buy his argument (I'm not sure I do), but Heidegger felt he had a good reason to distance himself from the existing discourse.

Are the main texts of postmodernism dense and hard to understand? Sure. Should they be a required reading for everyone? Of course not. But I don't think they are necessarily negative and I don't agree that they have no 'recommendation for what anybody should actually do'. Even Derrida, arguably the most deconstructive and 'negative' of the bunch, can be applied in a myriad of 'positive' ways, this is doubly true for authors like Deleuze & Guattari, for example. I think it ultimately depends on whether you view a critique of political or social structures as purely negative. I would argue that such a critique offers an avenue for change, by enabling us to see the status quo as something that can be attacked, rethought and then reformed.

But those are just my 2 cents on why I like (some of) the postmodernist authors. I think it's absolutely fine if not everyone buys into their thinking, I would just wish for a more honest engagement before dismissing them out of hand.

I agree with most of this. I don't think, though, that the obscurity of the postmodernist writers is just a matter of technical material not being accessible to non-specialists. There is a trickster and bullshitter element to what they were doing. The complicated aspect is that they were also expressing important truths.

The problem with the "always shifting always destabilizing" mode of a writer like Derrida is that it doesn't treat the listener as someone who matters. The listener is dispensable, while the author (ironically, the author who was supposed to have died) performs self-referential pirhouettes. There's something deeply non-relational about that, which I don't like. At the same time, I think the "nothing to see here" critics of the postmodernists are even more wrong.

Deleuze/Guattari is a different vein which I never really explored. I had a copy of Anti-Oedipus many years ago but I never really read it. It surprised me when they re-emerged as a fashionable item in the English-speaking world.

I want to suggest that you email Noam Chomsky in reply to his question here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeWWz4y1coU#t=34m58s

Chomsky spends hours every night answering everyone's emails because he thinks it's his duty. I wouldn't want to add to that load. Let him enjoy his new family and the Arizona sun or wherever he happens to be now.

The other thing though is that that is not a simple question. (Edit - the question in the video is: "Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false?") It has a trap door built in: the word 'triviality'. If you did find an answer, it would be easy to say it doesn't count because it's trivial. Doubly so because Chomsky already understands a lot of the same things about power and language—he has his own critiques of those, which are not identical with the postmodernists' but there are overlaps for sure—so a lot of that wouldn't strike him as new, just dressed up in pretentiousness. Triply so because if you have the mind of a Chomsky, most things are going to seem trivial anyway.

At a deeper level, Chomsky is an 18th century rationalist, so he's never going to accept a critique of the foundations of Enlightenment reason, and there's no single argument by which such critiques are conducted, let alone a single passage in a text that you can point to and say 'here it is'. Chomsky certainly understands this, so his question is really a bit of theater, a way of cauterizing a topic that he has been asked about incessantly for decades now and must find incredibly boring. He's so polite to the people who interview him, especially to naive questioners, that he doesn't show this directly, but you can see it in the charming way that he can't help but smile a tiny bit when he brings out his perfectly-crafted discussion-ending question. ("So that's about all I can say.")

I think a lot of what he's saying there (and in many other places where he's been asked about this) is more a matter of taste than real disagreement. To someone who values clarity of language and is a master of it, the gobbledygook of the postmodernists (which was mostly a concoction of a small intellectual scene in which people were competing on style) would seem godawful because it is, and would also seem like a huge distraction from things that matter.

I wouldn't want to reread the postmodernists. I did my time in grad school and came to dislike that material because it was so obscure, and because of the emporer's-new-clothes dynamic where everyone felt like they had to pretend to understand it because they were afraid of being the only one who didn't. The primary lesson I gained from that was how to be unafraid to ask a simple question. That's a powerful thing when no one else is willing to.

But what brought me around to respecting them was studying spiritual traditions whose critiques of human concept production are actually much closer to the postmodernists than anybody else. (Edit: I found an old comment where I wrote about this in more detail, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432). If you know anything about postmodernism, you know what an irony that is, because the postmodernists made a grand point of rejecting the language of spirit (e.g. presence, awareness, transcendence, anything higher) even more than they rejected the language of rationality. As a result, they end up with nothing. But if you become interested in looking at your own self-deception, nothing is a good thing to have. The conceptual solvents of postmodernism can be useful in that way, and as I said elsewhere in the thread: usually when people reject these things stridently, it's not because of what is wrong in them but because of what is right. (Another example is Freud, which is another story.) I wouldn't put Chomsky in that category though. I think he mostly just finds it uninteresting.

Thank you for this articulation. Sincerely made my day.

I might believe you are right, and that saddens me.

I am not an expert in post-modernism, but it all sounds a lot like it found the really fundamental timeless question that was emerging in the collective unconscious of their time but then decided to give a severely incomplete and exaggerated answer.

I would have preferred if history had moved toward a focus toward inward inspection and recentering rather than outward criticism and deconstruction.

Postmodernism gained traction as a critique of high-modernism, viz. the broad idea that the natural and social world can be reliably understood through large, complex theoretical frameworks and that this extends to remolding them more-or-less arbitrarily in a way that will create a kind of technological, economic etc. 'progress', 'evolution; or 'growth'. If you think that 'large, complex theoretical frameworks' are mostly BS and inherently subject to all sorts of observer biases, etc. that's at some level a postmodern idea, even though other broad viewpoints (such as pragmatism) would also agree with this.

The "postmodernism" that's criticized today has drifted quite a bit towards high-modernism itself. There was a shared sense when this first came up that you can only critique "large, complex theoretical frameworks" by building a new large, complex theoretical framework of your own. But ultimately it turned into a key weakness.

For a concise, clear summary, one cannot recommend Hicks enough:

https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-S...

> Hicks talks about postmodernism as a whole, but seems uninterested in the thinking of individual authors, who might problematize his tidy narrative generalizations.

Well, yes. Hicks is in the Sagan/Diamond mode of summarizing for a general audience.

Let's consider two academics. Academic A is constrained to traditional rational discourse and Academic B is constrained to post-modernism. Which of these two is going to publish more articles? The person that must meticulously build on prior research, or the person who can publish non-falsifiable articles with no chance of collision with prior work? Which of these two is going to get more grants for their institutions? Which of these two is going to get promoted and get tenure? Which of these is going to be in charge of advising the next generation of graduate students?

Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0

Or consider this scene from Mad Men:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39

Different industry, same phenomenon. Pursuit of truth and a notion of objective reality constrains discourse to a very limited band of possible outcomes, let alone actual outcomes. If you remove those constraints, the floodgates open and the signal will immediately be drowned by intentional noise. And if you don't play ball, your institutions will inevitably replace you with someone who will.

Ironically, this is a good Foucaultian critique of postmodernism as an academic field today. Foucault emphasized the relationship between knowledge and power relations, saying that the process of knowledge creation is no independent of the power structures which creates it (in this example, the academic institutions, the journals, and the allocation of capital)

Honestly, if Foucault came alive today and saw how the neoliberals took advantage of postmodernism (by stealing their language of difference and deconstruction to distract and prevent people from thinking about capital alongside to race/gender relations), he would be very disappointed.

Postmodernism in literary analysis was the capstone. By that time, we had already finished postmodernism in logic and physics, establishing that there is no algorithm for truth, that truth is undefinable, that words are only symbols without inherent meaning, that there is no absolute coordinate system, that time is relative and only partially-ordered, and that the Planck limit prevents direct precise observation of subatomic particles. These are all claims held forward variously by postmodernist theorists, but by the time they were claimed, they had already been proven or incorporated into scientific theories.

You seem to think incomprehensibility is a bad thing--and you are right, if one's goal is to understand, act, and thrive in this world. Your only tool would be reason.

But what if one draws their self-esteem not from their own accomplishment, but from the feelings of others? Then, incomprehensibility is ammunition for the argument from intimidation. You simply threaten to attack the character of anyone who disagrees.

It takes the form of: “Only a fool/deviant/sinner/idiot/ can fail to see that X argument is false/true.”

"Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize...that that’s a pretty narrow vision..."

The goal isn't to win the argument; the goal is to prevent any discussion at all. The only way to fight it is with moral certainty.

> You seem to think incomprehensibility is a bad thing

I do, but specifically, I would have thought that incomprehensibility is bad for spreading ideas. In order for ideas to spread, someone has to be willing to read these texts, overcome the hurdles of the dense language, and recognise something new, interesting and important; something they agree with. Incomprehensibility stands in the way of this process.

It depends. If the idea is spread by people understanding it and agreeing with it, then incomprehensibility is bad. But if the idea is spread because people want to feel pride in knowing something beyond the reach of most people, then incomprehensibility is a positive. The obscurity makes it a kind of intellectual "Veblen good".

But at that point, it's not being propagated based on its truth or usefulness, but merely as a form of signalling "I'm one of the smart ones". I suspect that at least part of the success of postmodernism is due to this.

Then whatever else it is that is spreading, it is certainly not an idea and none of the requirements you listed could have happened.

It gained traction because it was supported and funded by the Ford Foundation and other US agencies - possibly because it undermined traditional Marxism and replaced hardcore street-fighting leftism with a soup of politically and economically impotent pseudo-profound nonsense garnished by divisive identity politics.

It was also enthusiastically imported into US academia, where it became the new normal - a good way to keep intellectuals distracted while not being a real threat to established power. Unlike traditional Marxism and its offspring, which it successfully replaced.

two world wars

The hippies.