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THE_SO_CALLED_HOAX
June 18, 2003
The question has arisen
(or at least I think it has)
what exactly is my take on
postmodernism.
(*Yawn* *DELETE*)
It's like this.
I was busy being an engineering grunt when the
pomo craze really started to take off in
academia, so I barely noticed at the time.
In retrospect, I did come in contact
with some of the ideas fairly
frequently, e.g. I liked Delaney's
collection of critical works, _The
Jewel-Hinged Jaw_, and thought that _The American Shore_ is an
his _The American Shore_ was at entire book dedicated to
least interesting analyzing a Disch short
story -- probably
And I remember reading "The Name "deconstructing" would be a
of the Rose" with a definite more appropriate word than
"yeah, so?" reaction sometime "analyzing", but it sticks
around 83-84... in my throat, which perhaps
betrays how badly
(I never got into Delany's traumatized I was by the
"Neveryon" work, either.) pomo mafia).
NEVER_SAY_NEVERYON
But it wasn't until a few years
later that it really sank in that my
smattering of existentialism and Oddly enough, I think this
Nietzsche was no longer enough to realiztion came while
qualify as a hipster intellectual. poking around on usenet,
There was a new jabber going around, reading the alt.postmodern
people were talking semiotics, newsgroup.
Derrida, signifieds and signands and
what all...
My immediate reaction was something
like a sinking feeling that there
was still more stuff out there I
should really study one of these
days.
I wasn't immediately
hostile, though after
skimming around a bit
I had the thought:
"There seems to be an That one sentence summation came
awful lot of jargon to mind again when I started
here chasing a small looking into "objected oriented
number of ideas." programming" doctrine, a fad
which developed around the same
time as the pomo craze.
The possiblity that
there might be some
deep cultural
connection between
the two is probably
the most interesting
A few minutes ago I thought that I'm
copped out and started going to raise here
doing some web searches today....
for good examples of
pomoisms, and I turned And yet, I leave
up this: it buried in this
aside, and let it
drop.
"Society is elitist," says
Foucault. Marx's analysis of JARRING
Derridaist reading suggests that art
has significance, given that the
posttextual paradigm of reality is
valid. Thus, many desublimations
concerning Foucaultist power
relations may be found.
If one examines dialectic subtextual
theory, one is faced with a choice:
either reject Foucaultist power
relations or conclude that
consciousness is used to oppress
minorities. The premise of
deconstructivist narrative implies
that the raison d'etre of the writer
is social comment. In a sense, if
libertarianism holds, the works of
Gibson are postmodern.
The funny thing is that I kept re-reading that prose
trying to figure out what the author was getting at...
but really, this is just the output from this parody
generator:
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
This often seems to be one of the prime characteristics
of the postmodern realm: it *always* looks like nonsense,
so how can you tell if it's supposed to mean anything?
And that brings us to the infamous "Sokal Hoax", the
brilliant stroke that all us techies are supposed to
worship for having yanked aside the curtain, leaving the
pomosers revealed for what they are.
But I've never quite understood what the "Hoax" is
supposed to be here ("Prank" might be a better term
for it). A guy sat down and scribbled a bunch of
stuff he didn't believe, but figured some editors
would go for. They went for it. He stood up and
said he didn't believe in any of it. So?
It seems to me that the thing that's really damning, the
thing that makes the "Social Text" crew look like fools
is the way they behaved afterwards. What they *should*
have done was stick to their guns:
"This just goes to show that author intent
really is irrelevent: Sokal managed to say
interesting things without meaning to."
"Certainly it's true that there are many things
in this work that seem nonsensical, or at
least, paradoxical, but we don't agree that the
only things worth publishing are those which
are guaranteed to be true. 'Truth' is
notoriously difficult to determine, and not as
simple a concept as it appears to the
naive... we are engaged with enabling dialog,
and if Sokal wishes to have a dialog with
himself, we're glad to provide a forum for it."
If you look at what they actually did say, it was more
along the lines of:
"We had some questions about his essay, but he
refused to revise it. We ran it anyway,
because we thought we had found a new ally in
the sciences"
In other words, they published it not because of what it
said -- which they could tell was lousy -- but because
of *who wrote it*. They pretty much admitted to
intellectual bankruptcy, but they're so far gone they
didn't realize how lame they sounded...
But here we are, on the other side of the flack,
well into the pomo-backslash. All of this stuff
is a dead issue now, right?
But I still run into it now and then, sometimes
from people who you would think would know better...
ENGLEBARTS_BARD
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