“POSTMODERNISM” - A CRIME AGAINST HUMAN CIVILIZATION?
1. “Postmodernism” - a movement against objective truth?
In 1996, the U.S. physicist Alan Sokal had unmasked the evil, anti-scientific nature of “postmodernism” - an academic and art movement that had rooted itself deep and strong in the West in the late half of the 20th century. 3 weeks after Social Text - a postmodern academic journal - published the article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity of Sokal [1] in its special series Science Wars, Sokal stated that it was a complete rubbish scientific article that he wrote using literary elements of postmodernism just to test the academic selectivity of his colleagues from humanity disciplines. The result was that he was able to verify what would later be taken by the world as a universal truth: that his colleagues from humanity disciplines were more or less just a bunch of second-rate researchers who employed some trendy jargon and some confusing way of writing to spread their existing political biases. Alan Sokal was the initiator for a crusade against anti-scientism and the distrust in objective truth existing in non-natural science fields. He revealed countless people in these sciences who believed the laws of physics were but wordplays.After Sokai, many other big names in the fields of social studies, such as Stephen Hicks, Noam Chomsky and Jordan Peterson, had also taken their turns to voice against the anti-progressiveness of “Postmodernism”. The philosopher Stephen Hicks [2] said with a straight face in his “work of a lifetime” Explain Postmodernism: “From the postmodern anti-realist metaphysics and anti-reason epistemology, the postmodern social consequences follow almost directly. Once we set aside reality and reason, what are we left with to go on?” Noam Chomsky [3] condemned postmodernism for being the theoretical basis for fake news, conspiracy theories and the age of Post-truth; and as no one could ever bring themselves to trust objective, exhaustive universal truths again, the evil political groups could easily make their way the top by spreading false propaganda presented sentimental language. Jordan Peterson [4] claimed that Marxism had disguised itself in postmodernism to retain its influence after its disastrous failure in the CCCP.One of humanity’s greatest achievements was the discovery of the universal truth that is perfectly objective, complete and true, that exists entirely independent from human perception. With that being the case, then Derrida, Rorty, Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze, Lyotard… why were all these men trying to defy it? Were these heretics trying to undo every progress ever made by the Western civilization and hoped to reduce this world to the stone age? If that’s the case, then postmodernism was indeed a crime to mankind and deserves all the punishments. But before we do so, it wouldn’t hurt if we learn a few more things about these people and their ideas. First, all of these researchers, who were labeled “postmodern”, had never claimed themselves to have any connection with this term as an -ism. These people were in fact so conflicting in many points of their fundamental rationale that they could hardly be banded under the same banner. They were in fact parts of various other academic movements like phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, posthumanism … none of these were nearly simple enough to be represented even by the totality of characteristics usually attributed to postmodernism like “skepticism”, “nihilism”, relativism”..., let alone being called out with a name that hardly had any specificity to it like “postmodernism”.Secondly, the named crusaders against “postmodernism” in fact had never attacked or even voiced their objection against any specific arguments of any of the scholars they labeled as “postmodern”, nor did they mention all the -isms we mentioned earlier as the schools of thought actually championed by the said scholars. All they really did was to umbrella them under the much ambiguous term “postmodernism” and attacked them. Later, in his book Fashionable nonsense, Alan Sokal himself [5] had admitted that his article should only be seen as nothing more than a nonchalant prank. He said that what he was trying to do then was to remind people that the terms of natural sciences should not be employed without consideration of their full meaning like a lot of people did in their academic articles, instead of actually trying to discredit a few certain fields of studies. Sokal also admitted that he in fact did not understand much of what he quoted from Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, Foucault and other scholars who he named as examples of “postmodernism”. Indeed, at the end of the day, what Sokal did in the said attempt of his was essentially him putting up an article on a journal almost infamous for their lack of academic credibility and procedure for peer-review (meaning that they were more than willing to publish an article from an author without having fellow scientists to review it first), and so it was essentially a prank and should not have been taken as anything more than one. However, if a good number of scholars somehow decided to take it as a full-fledged academic scandal instead, and in turns devilized an academic movement that might actually not exist anywhere else outside of their imagination, under which they umbrella-ed a bunch of completely unrelated schools of thoughts, then I think we certainly have something to say about it. For that reason, I made sure to keep the term “postmodernism” in the quotation marks in every instance it’s mentioned throughout Part I, just to highlight the idea that the concept might have been only the brainchild of a handful of big-name scholars rather than an objective, universal existence. And that we were criticizing that existence(?) without the right idea of what it exactly was.
2. As an academic movement, “postmodernism” doesn’t exist.
The journalist Richard Seymour [6] called “postmodernism” the “sacrificial lamb” of this age. Any of the worst evils of this age could easily be blamed over “postmodernism”, just like in the case we presented in Part I. Indeed, in a society where humans were administered by science and rationality,, anything that defies any of those two things could easily be seen as skeptical or anarchistic. However, little did people understand about the origin and the true nature of “postmodernism” (or the things so labeled), and they indeed meant much more than “the skepticism against singular truths” or “anti-scientism”. They represented a much-sophisticated stage of development of Western literature, art and philosophy amid the dawn of globalization.First, in order to understand what “postmodernism'' is, we have to understand the attitude of modernism toward the domination of natural science and the global reign of rationality. The skepticism toward the rationalism of mankind in fact had already emerged since the late 19th century, as artists were faced by the bloody reality of colonial wars and the mercilessness of the West toward cultures that were not their own. The overwhelming pessimism induced by these realities was then amplified even further by the Russian Revolution, as they learned that the socialist society - the promised utilitarian utopia - was only buildable with endless bloodshed and dictatorship. The two atomic bombs created by Americans that wiped out the two Japanese cities and the people living there also wiped out the trust in the core philosophy of the old world and opened up a new world teeming with uncertainty on mankind’s right to the driving seat of the world. However, the attitude of mankind toward the post-war crumbling of the reign of rationality was not exactly that of sorrow, but celebration instead [7]. They realized that it was the absolutism they granted to the Western way of thinking and humanity values as they thought should be universal for the entire mankind that was the roots of wars and many other catastrophes: Prior to that, people never realized that a universal truth interpreted from a point of view solely of their own could never be the universal truth, and as a result, the universal truth was instead something forced by the stronger group over the weaker group through bloodshed and wars, and the result was endless humanitarian crises. Adding the prefix “post” to modernism, the post-war artistic community believed that by instating pluralism in voicing opinions, we could restrain the influence of some radical systems of ideology that had led to genocides, such as fascism or totalitarianism. In other words, “postmodernism” was meant to inherit and to even push forward many aspects of modernism, and was never meant to eradicate whatever preceded it.And so, for something to be called “postmodern”, it should bear the true nature of “postmodernism” as an art and literary movement, instead of a united academic and universal movement. In the more solemn territory of the academic world, serious conversation on whether or not postmodern art should replace modern art had already taken place. An example was the debate between Jean Francois Lyotard (a postmodernist) and Jurgen Habermas (a modernist) [8]. While Habermas believed that the function of art was to heal wounds and portray a reality of unison for the entire world after the war, Lyotard argued that to share a common reality had by itself been an illusion created by colonialism; he believed that it was the break down of the common reality (that was readily established by the ruling class using their influence over the media) had opened the door to countless other possibilities for life, without having to tread the branchless path envisioned by either historical materialism or the End of his story thesis. So, what we need to do is to understand “postmodernism” more as an orientation, which is constantly reshaped by the much complex historical background it is subjected to. It should not be seen as a kind of theory, as if “postmodernism” is some kind of core ideology that any person identifying themselves as postmodern has to adhere to.
3. Postmodern condition.
The postmodern condition, or postmodernity, is in fact very distinctive from “postmodernism”. When speaking of “postmodernism” as an -ism, you are referring to the questioning of the authority of absolute knowledge and truth such as traditional moral values - which is a concept of the fields of artistry. Postmodern condition, on the other hand, refers to the postmodern condition of the society, meaning the condition of widespread pessimism within the society as the people within it felt divided by skepticism and the lack of a common voice. In other words, the postmodern condition refers to the society with the widest generalization. The condition serves both as the inspiration for artists to translate into their artworks the partially nihilistic disappointment they had before the changes of time, and the pressure for the academic world to come up with a framework that better explains the way how this new world works [9]. In other words, the society’s loss of trust in absolute truths and their hobby to cook up fake news and conspiracy theories were in fact more a product of postmodern condition (than postmodernism). The theories that were often grouped under the term “academic postmodernism” were meant to describe and explain what was happening within the society, instead of inspiring anything. History has shown that the chaos brought by the postmodern condition was certainly not the aftermath of a handful of theories from a few French philosophers. Instead, it was the consequences of the great powers’ struggle for the lion share of the global market after the war is over; which was essentially a war but with less bloodshed - where the people were pitted against each other in an arms race of consumption in the market economy instead of shooting each other on the battlefield. Consumerism and the advertising industry had replaced the entire real world with spectacles, signs, and copies without originals. The physical world was gradually replaced with the world of images, exaggeration and manipulations, and mass production. The disappointment before the postmodern condition was already clearly visible in the critical theory works in the early 20th century, such as The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Benjamin as well as many other works from the Frankfurt School. However, it was only until the 60s-70s of the same century had it come into the picture, the first attempts in the endeavor to explain the big picture of the postmodern condition with a comprehensive theoretical basis provided by Phenomenology, Semiotic, Structuralism, Postrictiralism, Marxism, etc. The first two famed works to initiate this movement were Madness and Civilization (1961) by Michel Foucault and Of Grammatology (1967) by Jacques Derrida. And, without saying, for one to try to explain the big picture of the society that one was still living in was definitely a much precarious way of life. It’s just like how it is incredibly difficult for a fish that spends the entirety of its life in water to know the true nature of the water it lives in; the works to decode the big picture of the postmodern condition could easily become incredibly illegible and prone to misinterpretation. It’s almost inevitable that the critics of postmodernism became completely lost in the labyrinth of theories that the scholars they criticized actually had to work with; and instead, they had to make a huge ass strawman of it called “postmodernism” just to make it easier for them to throw punches. It has to be noted that the theorists who were labeled as “postmodern” never intended to advocate whatever was happening in the postmodern condition; instead, they tried to describe and criticize it with a theoretical frame of reference and a system of methodology just as perfectionistic and rigorous as that used by any serious scientific studies.
4. A critique against the limitations of mankind’s capacity for knowing.
The term “social construct” was one of the central concepts to the theories that criticize the postmodern condition as a whole, and was also a potential target for natural scientists and philosophers who wanted a piece of these theories. For it to say that the nature of the world was but a creation of clever word schemes, culture and power, wouldn’t that mean it was essentially just idealism called by a different name? And their criticism of technological discoveries and the media (which were two of the major contributors to the postmodern condition), would it make these critics neo-conservatives who could only appreciate the social structures of the past while could never set their outlook to the future?What we are supposed to do with the arguments of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard is to take them as Epistemological theories, a.k.a. the theories concerning the nature and limitation of mankind’s knowledge. These scholars believed that mankind’s being the protagonist did make it impossible for them to fully fathom the nature of the society, of nature and of the universe. We would always find ourselves faced by limitations of our knowledge, of the historical, cultural and language environment in any attempt to perfectly objectively explain the nature of the world. To explain the world using knowledge, you would always find yourself going around the truth, taking the detour that is language. For this reason, the arguments of Ontology - the theories concerning the nature of existence - could never be fully representative.This theoretical ecology made up by the French scholars in the mid 20th century could also be seen as critiques. They believed that even the most “common” and “subjective” experiences could in reality be subject to the subjectivity of the dominant group within the society. The power of the dominant group was evident by the fact that they could easily see themselves as flawless and omnipotent protagonists, who were completely free from the limitations of the human physical body and knowledge and thus could attain the unobstructed bird’s-eye view of the truth. And by the same logic, Western rationalism was also seen as a seamless, uninterrupted flow with the next step of development following the preceding ones: religious knowledge was denied by idealist knowledge, idealism was denied by scientific realism, and so on … As a debate against this way of thinking, the continental philosophers pointed out the irregularities in the systems of rationality and common sense of the past, not to glorify the past, but instead to prove to the audience that the modern day’s lifestyle and social order was not the sole possibility for existence, and was not natural, nor was it supposed to remain for the eternity of history. The product of the said critique was not meant to be the skepticism and questioning of the nature of nature, the universe or any study subjects of natural sciences. The nature of the laws of physics by itself was not limited by the craftsmanship of language, but instead, it was the linguistic limitation faced by the natural scientists that caused them unable to exhaustively depict the true nature of the laws of physics. The critique’s real target was the human limitations of the scientists, and by realizing and overcoming these limitations, sciences could uphold an even more rigorous and effective academic standard and, as a result, could make their way even closer to the truth. So, in summary, the thinkers traditionally stigmatized under the evil label of “postmodernism” were in fact just utterly misunderstood, and were falsely antagonized as a result. On the other hand, their objects of criticism, namely Post-truth, conspiracy theories, one-way political propaganda, dictatorship and subjective bias in scientific studies, were definitely seen as objects of criticism just virtually anywhere else across fields of studies, albeit less intensively so. The position of advocating a new world with more pluralism, democracy and wholesomeness was definitely ideal for any scientist from any other field. The big lesson meant to be conveyed by “modernism”, or otherwise the several tens of other -isms we umbrella-ed underneath that term, to my understanding, of course not without the risk of oversimplifying their views, is that “All Generalizations Are Bad” [10].
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