Thread by @xolotl

OK, I've reached my limit — I can't take it anymore. Here comes a rant about how it seems like everyone in the USA is getting "post-modernism" wrong.

Context: I'm listening to Philosophy Talk's episode "Is Postmodernism Really to Blame for Post-Truth?" 1/ philosophytalk.org/shows/postmode…

2/ First, on the term itself. "Postmodernism" can mean so many different things — from specific movements in art, architecture & literature to an entire socio-cultural era — and yet it has become the term for a punching bag filled with a variety of misunderstandings.

3/ I can't bring myself to continue this "PoMo" misnomering. It just confuses everything. So I'm going to call it "critical theory" or CT for lack of a better term.

1 might also ID it as the post-structuralist tradition of investigating the relations between power & knowledge.

4/ So if you are just going to wave your hands and wag your lips about "PoMo": step off and shut up. You don't know WTF you are talking about.

<stern glance at Jordan Peterson and hiz boyz>

5/ So what everyone really has their knickers in a twist about is CT, which they have clearly misunderstood in several fundamental ways (even the nice guys on Philosophy Talk).

6/ The situation everyone is reacting to — what folks like Philosophy Talk (PT) are calling "Post-Truth Society" (PTS) — is a real thing: facts and truth are being contested now in powerful ways, with profound effects.

But the connections to CT are painfully wrong.

7/ I'll stop to say that a careful listener to PT will see that I'm in strong agreement with most of the POVs presented in that episode — pretty much every philosopher they interviewed called BS on this whole ridiculous framework of blaming CT for post-truth.

8/ Now let's list the mistakes in this ridiculous argument that "PoMo" — or what I'm calling "critical theory" (CT) — caused post-truth.

9/ First and foremost, the idea that CT promoted relativism or the idea that "all truths are equal" or that everyone's "truth" is equally valid is totally and completely and utterly f'ing wrong.

So if that's your ante, you're not playing.

10/ What CT DOES do is investigate how truths are constructed, especially in relation to who has the power and — especially since capitalism arose — the money.

And if you think truths aren't constructed by power and money: YOU AREN'T PAYING F'ING ATTENTION!!!

11/ If you think Derrida & Foucault et al made it possible for the 45 administration to spout lies and defund science, your conception of how change actually happens is totally wrong and I've got a reading list for you.

12/ Maybe opportunists like Cernovich read some CT in college, but that doesn't mean CT made them do the evil shit they do. They probably were forced to read Whitman too like everyone else and we are not blaming Leaves of Grass.

13/ So if you take one thing away from this rant, get this your thick skull so we don't have to teach it again:

Investigating how truth is constructed is not the same thing as saying all truths are equal or there is no truth.

14/ Next big mistake: Yes a lot of CT is hard to understand. You know why? Because the people that f'ing wrote CT read a lot more books than you and thought about things harder than you and were engaged in conversations you know little about and wrote in languages you don't read.

15/ The fact that you get confused when you read CT doesn't mean it is wrong or not useful and if you can't understand it, read some f'ing Terry Eagleton or some other gateway text until you can start to grok it.

16/ Adorno actually wrote to be hard to understand ON PURPOSE because he wanted you to have to WORK to understand, because some understanding is NOT EASY! You are not the center of the universe my friend.

17/ Another big mistake in this whole sorry mess is the muddled thinking that the central agenda of CT was to promote the interests of people of different classes, genders, races, sexualities, abilities, etc.

18/ Yes, yes, yes, my son. Many writers in the CT tradition investigate how power/knowledge relates to identity, and some are themselves people with non-dominant identities.

19/ You know why? Because guess what? When you investigate power/knowledge, what do you find?

You find how power/knowledge shapes identity, most especially, how P/K shapes other identities in relation to dominant identities.

20/ If you are going to do CT (or really any legitimate social science) responsibly, you can't help but connect with intersections of P/K and class, gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc.

So all that is not the agenda of CT, it is CT's findings. Read'em and weep!

21/ Do people with non-dominant identities, poor people, women, people of color, LGBTQ+, the differently abled — let's call them social justice warriors (SJWs) for short— have a special interest in CT?

Yes they do! You know why?

22/ Do SJWs have a special interest in CT? YES! Because SJWs are f'ing oppressed by dominant P/K that's why.

And that's why you should have an interest in CT too, unless you don't give a F about the culture in which you live.

23/ So to recap about CT: it's not relativism, it's hard to understand for reasons, and it's not a SJW agenda, it's an exposure of why we should all be SJWs.

24/ So why is this ridiculous argument that "PoMo" or critical theory (CT) caused "post-truth society" alive in the USA?

Guess what? CT itself can tell us why.

25/ There is an academic machine in the USA that got built by the GI Bill after WWII. It's job was to deliver higher education to a lot of people, some of whom were to go on to be part of the machine to deliver more higher education.

26/ Meanwhile, CT was doing some pretty sophisticated investigations into power/knowledge (P/K), mostly in Europe.

27/ The academic machine in the USA sucked in Europe's CT and spit it out in the form of a bunch of people who were trained to reproduce the form of CT, but not necessarily advance it or apply it critically to new contexts.

28/ CT shows us that this is actually a USA specialty: taking stuff from someplaces else and massproducing it, not necessarily with the same quality

29/ So has there been a lot of BS critical theory (CT) in USA grad schools? YES!

Does that invalidate CT, or does that help us think about what USA grad schools are really doing?

30/ On top of that, there's a very focused effort to devalue intellectualism (and science) in the USA and it has adopted this misguided critique of critical theory (CT) to further its nefarious ends.

If you adopt this misguided critique, you are abetting those nefarious ends.

31/31 SO: wake the F up and stop blaming Derrida for this horrible situation we find ourselves in.

Don't be a naive patsy that plays into this scam!

Join the SJWs in investigating power/knowledge to build a more equitable and just society for everyone!

END

PS: I posted an improved version with contextual links and annotation on my blog. Add your thinking there! #PoMo #CriticalTheory xolotl.org/rant-on-pomo/