Thread by @AcadFreedom

Will read a few essays written by Oliver Traldi and published by @AreoMagazine

starting with this one

areomagazine.com/2018/01/08/pos…

"I’ll briefly discuss one element of postmodernism that’s absent from the modern academic and cultural politics that are criticized as postmodern. The absent element I will discuss is play."

"The classic statement of play in continental philosophy, often conceived of as the sort of think tank of postmodernism, was Jacques Derrida’s break from structuralism into poststructuralism, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”...

... A lecture he delivered at a 1966 Johns Hopkins conference sparkling with French thinkers like Lacan and Barthes, it ended up overturning much of the tradition the conference was intended to crystallize."

"Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure, and arguably on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Derrida wrote that words mean things only by differentiating themselves from other words, and not by transcending this referential game in reaching reality. When one term...

... in a dyad like male/female, presence/absence, being/becoming, signified/signifier, speech/writing, etc., is privileged in some sort of theory, it amounts to a kind of violence, which Derrida thought his interpretive method, deconstruction, could only ever uncover, not end."

"Over time, the influence of Derrida and like-minded theorists led to a break on the left which has resurfaced with the “new old Left” of Jacobin and Current Affairs. Derrida, critics said, was just playing around with words. How could serious moral or political claims follow?"

"But Derrida’s students and followers included feminists like Hélène Cixous and postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Though still criticized by Marxists like Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton throughout debates in the 1990s, they surely sounded...

... as though they were talking about right and wrong. When Spivak waved her hands about a “subaltern” more “other” than the Levinas-Derrida-inspired Other, it was taken to have implications for our view, and practice, of justice."

"In deconstruction, the game was to show how a text problematized its own “violence.” Every text, Derridaeans thought, contained resources sufficient for its own critique. But in the new era of virtue-signaling and apology-extracting this method hasn’t remained popular...

... Rather, the project of “critique,” outlined recently by Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, is now carried out by the “hermeneutics of suspicion”."

"The Repressive Hypothesis, which Foucault derided, was this: People start out with sexualities, prior to (or uncaused by) their encounters with society, and the state punishes the expression of some of them. For the postmodern gamesman Foucault, though...

..., sexualities did not exist before they were constructed as part of a “discourse.” The violence of biopower is already there before any repression, in organization and classification systems, for instance."

"The “playful” terms and topics of the postmoderns retain a great deal of currency in academia and in social justice more broadly. But it is no longer a game. Alongside this, the elaborate and often terribly wrongheaded philosophical justifications fall by the wayside...

... Now that the moral importance of words and symbols, especially when it comes to identity, is common ground for many academics and lefty activists...

..., there is no need for elaborate theories about words gaining meaning through differentiation, or about the inaccessibility or the nonexistence of an extra-linguistic world."

"Now I’ll give my three explanations of the phenomenon. The first has to do with disciplinary boundaries characteristic of the modern era and the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism...

... The second is more political: it says the groups who wanted to play decided to stop once they’d won. The third concerns generational psychology – “snowflakes” and “free range kids” and so forth."

"Explanation 1: Boundaries coming down and the dominance of the political"

"Jürgen Habermas cites Max Weber’s definition of cultural modernity as the separation of science, art, and morality, which had previously been unified by religion, into “three autonomous spheres.”...

... These three domains each had an “inner logic” according to which they would develop toward the ends of truth, beauty, and the good. Postmodernism tore down these walls."

"Of course, the breaking down of boundaries and “binaries” was a central postmodern project. But my first explanation goes like this: Having been gloshed into one undifferentiated mass of discourse, the three former spheres did not remain equal in influence...

... Rather, it was politics, a subset of the moral sphere, that came to dominate both science and art."

"A radical formulation of this explanation might suggest that politics intrinsically holds back intellectual and artistic development, and that the progress of modernism was accomplished by relegating politics somehow elsewhere. But this is probably not historically tenable."

"Explanation 2: Winning by your rules, then playing by mine"

"So-called postmodernists, this explanation would have it, played around with words and symbols just long enough to gain a foothold in a few different institutions...

... Now the same tools that were used for play, to suggest for instance that a certain possibility can’t be definitively ruled out, are used for other purposes, to suggest for instance that a certain possibility is definitively correct."

"Values and identity, allowed to “play around” on the field of otherwise objective research, become the only game in town; and then it’s not a game anymore."

"Explanation 3: Generational fragility and coddling minds"

"This explanation goes: Postmodernism is just one small trend in academia, the media, and the arts. A larger trend is what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called, over two years ago now, “the coddling of the American mind”...

..., an increasing sensitivity to (especially emotional) injury, discomfort with novelty, lack of willingness to hear opposing viewpoints, and so forth."