Transcription
Truth, knowledge, reason, progress—these are the core values of the intellectual and philosophical movement called modernism. There's also an art movement called modernism, but this is typically the modernism that the name postmodernism refers to. These are also interchangeably called Enlightenment values, but we're going to keep on using the term modernism for this video because it's easier.
Modernism is essentially the belief in human progress through the development of human knowledge. A good example of a quintessential modernist book is this one: the encyclopedia. Modernism was all about trying to sharpen up human thinking and get rid of loose, lazy thinking. It was all about trying to pin down and arrange truth into verifiable boxes. And that all sounds good, but it's always been controversial. So, say if you're using empiricism to try to establish some idea of objective truth, and along the way you don't put God in the answer, for a lot of people that's not going to go over so well. But this video isn't about them; this video is about postmodernists.
The original postmodernists were French intellectuals who started in the 60s. They embodied the disillusioned post–World War II pushback against modernism from the left. They basically said that we've all drank the modernism Kool-Aid, and that modernism is too constrictive, and we need to loosen up our thinking in order to free ourselves and see all these aspects of the world that we've been blind to. If there's a clean antonym for simplification, I think that that would describe postmodernism well. You could say complication. Postmodernism is the complication of modernism. Simplification is basically garlic to post-artists.
In the spirit of complication, the original postmodernists pushed this idea that there's no one objectively correct way to view anything, which was designed to give a hard time to people who had high opinions of these values. To postmodernists, knowledge isn't objective, and it's not something that's out there in the external world, like behind a bush somewhere waiting to be discovered. To postmodernists, knowledge is a subjective social construction that's created using the subjective human toolbox, like the brain, and it's further disconnected from reality because we formulate it using the artifice of language. In their eyes, this all makes any human attempts at getting a handle on any kind of objective reality inherently compromised and prone to human fallibility.
Another postmodern argument is that we privilege some things at the expense of marginalizing others. So, to give an example, let's say the internet's developed, YouTube comes around, and we start to privilege—and by privilege I mean pay a bunch of attention to—the method of, say, concepts being explained through video at the cost of marginalizing concepts being explained, say, through books. And they try to even that out. They say we should see the flaws that we might be blind to, and the things that we're privileging, and we should see the values that we might be overlooking in the things that we're marginalizing. These are relativistic arguments. Since our attempts to understand the world are artificial and subjective and prone to human error, we can never be fully sure that our ideas are objectively correct or that our values are superior to the ideas or values of people in, say, other cultures. So they might say that a modernist who believes that the scientific method is objectively the best framework for trying to understand the world is marginalizing and maybe even oppressing someone in a different side of the world who maybe thinks that the best framework, um, to build knowledge and understanding is maybe, um, spiritual based.
Here's some relativism put plainly by one of the original postmodernists in a more recent book: "The Gulf War did not take place."
Another major postmodern argument says that in the social construction of things there are hidden dynamics of power everywhere, and they see it as their job to give us the tools to unmask those dynamics so that people can see them plainly and in doing that become more free. That might all sound good to you, but you might be less thrilled about it once they started applying that to science. They were definitely criticized at the time, but I think the original postmodernists saved themselves some trouble by avoiding making any kind of strong statement about core beliefs outright. So their writing reads more like swimming in circles, where they'll take little jabs at modernism here and there, but they'll never commit to, say, a more direct takedown of it. And a lot of the quotes out there that seem like they're doing a good job of summarizing postmodern thought actually aren't from the original post-artists; they're actually falsely attributed, and they're from experts that are trying to summarize the original postmodernists. So with science, they'll take little jabs at it here and there. They'll say that science can't be objective because its researchers are inherently biased, and they'll say that science has been terribly wrong in the past and that we've used it as a tool to oppress other cultures, but they'll never say to get rid of science altogether. And it's hard to find any one sentence or two that totally encapsulates their view towards science. So some people will say that postmodernism is anti-science, but I think that's a strong statement. I think that they were trying to tell us that we've been overvaluing science and that we should be more skeptical of it, to see the flaws.
So you might not like them, and you might not like how they did it, but I think it's good to try to be fair to them and to try to appreciate that the original postmodernists were probably sincerely trying to help people. They're trying to get them to think for themselves, and they're trying to free them from what they saw as the oppressive aspects of society. Foucault, for example, tried to make us more aware of how modernist Western culture marginalizes people who we label as mentally ill more than we did in previous eras. Or in another book, he warned us how the threat of surveillance can condition society into docile conformity and how the process of taking criminal punishment out from the public square and moving it behind closed prison doors actually consolidates state power since it lets them conduct power games over prisoners while staying mostly out of the public mind. That last one might seem pretty obscure, but you could definitely make it relevant. You could apply it to, say, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and use it to say that the state's very public punishment of those individuals was actually pretty risky for the state to do since it sets the stage for a public backlash.
A rare, pretty straightforward definition of postmodernism did come from this guy towards the end of the movement. After prefacing that he's simplifying to the extreme—which to me reads like he's wincing while he does it—he says that postmodernism is defined by an incredulity towards metanarratives, which is generally accepted to mean skepticism towards big stories that we forward to each other about how the world works. This meant that there is a box around postmodernism; it could only describe problems and couldn't prescribe solutions because prescribing a solution would be creating a meta-narrative of your own. So it had all these critiques towards modernism and, by extension, Western civilization's toolkit, but postmodernism couldn't provide a framework around what to do with those critiques. So if someone wanted to make a functional movement out of postmodernism, they'd have to take some aspects of it but throw away others.
Some writers and activists must have seen that opportunity because between the late 80s and early 90s there was a flurry of writing that did just that, fusing postmodernism with leftist identity politics. Here's the paper that introduced intersectionality, and the writer clearly says intersectionality is an attempt to fuse postmodernism with contemporary politics, by which we're supposed to assume she means leftist identity politics. Around the same time, in the book that argued for gender being a social construction, Judith Butler explicitly named Foucault as her basis for doing so. And again, around the same time, bell hooks used postmodernism to call on people to form coalitions along the lines of identity and embrace their own meta-narrative that the world is roughly broken into two groups: the oppressed and the oppressors, and the oppressed need to band together. In her adaptation, hooks uses the term radical postmodernism, and I think that works pretty well, so I'm going to keep on using that term going forward for the rest of this video to keep their version separate from the original French postmodernism. Those are all major texts from feminism and critical race theory, and there's countless more that explicitly spelled out the adaptation happening at the time. Here's a recent clear example of radical postmodernism by a critical race theorist that we're all pretty familiar with by now. The word postmodernism doesn't show up, but the concept is there.
The major ideas that radical postmodernists took from French postmodernists are: one, seeing the world through the hidden dynamics of power and oppression; two, is the problematization of Western civilization and, by extension, modernist values like objective truth and replacing that with emphasizing personal truth and cultural relativism; and three, is seeing concepts through the lens of social construction, and that gives them the tools to marginalize those concepts if those concepts are inconvenient. This new radical postmodernism doesn't have any of the hesitance towards making strong overarching statements and making their own metanarratives that the original French postmodernists had. And I think it's interesting looking at how that meta-narrative was created because it wasn't created with modernist values; it wasn't created using, say, first principles and rational thinking that's built from the ground up and would hold up well in good faith debate, and it wasn't made using the best empirical evidence that we have available. Instead, it was made using singular data points here and there if they're convenient and often out of context, and much more importantly, it was made through the authority of experience and collective known truth. So, for example, you might ask for evidence to substantiate a claim that a radical postmodernist makes, and they might say, in this case, they don't need science; science is a white male construct, and people of color already know what's true.
The original French postmodernists, at least in my read, I think were trying to bring nuance to modernism. I think they're trying to act like a supplemental garnish to the main course of modernism without ever totally overthrowing it. I think in comparison, the radical postmodernists, in their aggressiveness against rationality and in their aggressive subjective redefinition of these values, I think they become something else entirely. I think they become actively anti-modern. I think the original French postmodernists were trying to encourage us to be more skeptical about the world. I think that radical postmodernists do the opposite. In their metanarratives, they happily make strong statements about the world that are supposed to radically redefine how we look at it, and we're not supposed to be skeptical of those statements. You're not supposed to run those statements through the rigors of modernism. I think this is all coming across so far as dehumanizing to radical postmodernists. So, for the sake of injecting some nuance, I think you could say something that would be fair, like: radical postmodernists almost certainly are trying to help; I think they just have a confused way of going about it. And even with that said, I think they almost certainly have had some major accomplishments, like taking the violence that's typically gone on until now quietly and in private against women, uh, into, uh, taking that and turning it into a major national issue and putting a spotlight on it. But at the end of the day, all we're really talking about here is the packaging around an identity politics movement, and right now that packaging is anti-modern.
So with all these achievements, there's been an uphill battle to preserve modernist values along the way. So with the example of, say, gender, there's been an uphill battle to keep us from becoming ignorant along the way about biology and genetics. So packaging can be changed. I think that we could still be making these achievements, maybe even better, without being so hostile towards these values.
So if all that wasn't enough, let me end by leaving you with a quote by someone who's smarter than me for you to chew on: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist." And with that, thanks for listening, and see you next time.