>"Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."
Postmodernism BTFO'd by Chomsky
I think the best anti-POMO text is this one:
itre.cis.upenn.edu
>My colleague would open one of Derrida's works to a random page, pick a random sentence, write it down, and then (above or below it) write a variant in which positive and negative were interchanged, or a word or phrase was replaced with one of opposite meaning. He would then challenge the assembled Derrida partisans to guess which was the original and which was the variant. The point was that Derrida's admirers are generally unable to distinguish his pronouncements from their opposites at better than chance level, suggesting that the content is a sophisticated form of white noise.
lmaooo what the fuck
peak of intellectual masturbation
bump
I actually guessed which Derrida passage was real correctly. If you gave a hundred samples, I could probably do it at better than chance, from a familiarity with his stuff. I don't think much of Derrida, but the test is hyperbolic.
You steal my post on /p/? Wheres my credit
:Sokalbot was write about everything: The deontological hypermatrix of /God's enema/ is the quantiverified parasitism of /time's being in a panic room/: The hoax itself was rite about everything, that which is written is the hoax of the future, a hedonic treadmill of Time's exit stage left: Capital markets gibberish until it becomes hipsterism and all that jazz: Adorno was wrong only about one thing, after the Holocaust /the poememenon/ becomes everything: The poem is the automatic righting of catastrophe, just as God's Telos is the troll of the past: Sokalbot's God is the polishing machine of /cosmological stillness/ become One within Whitehead's verisimulator: Language as the being of time is forced into timebending space by gravitational will, the water orbs in the International Space Station: /Land's God/ was write about everything, especially where the power of the Orgone energy accumulator refines information into God's colostomy bag: Sokalbot's final transmission: /mite makes rite/: /mte mks rte/: /mmr/
I get this point but really how arrogant do you have to be to think it requires a genetic mutation to make something out of your depth? Foucault is not harder than quantum theory (which one btw? hard to believe Chosky really understands it) but he's different. That can understand difficult theory A does not mean you'll understand everything that is less difficult than theory A (the concept of absolute difficulty of theory doesn't even really makes sense, particularly accross different fields).
I'm noticing that his 2) implies that he's interested in the field, and it seems that this isn't the case for post-modernism. Why not just say "what I've read of it doesn't seem like it would be interesting even if I understood, so I'll pass"?
And what about the thousand of people who have read and claim to understand Foucault? Are they all deluded or lying?
I have no love for postmodernism but Chomsky does come accross as kind of a hack here.
Maybe Derrida's "partisans" are retarded, as partisans often are. Why not ask the legit scholars and collegues who studied with him or under him?
You could do this with sections of Finnegans Wake and I'm sure lots would get it wrong. Parsing individual sentences can be a fools game.
Makes me think of how Thomas Aquinas writes, with that format of question, answer 1, answer 2, synthesis etc. You could quote bits out of context and people would be sure to get it wrong because you quoted from one of the counter arguments he goes on to dismiss.
the most based man ever
>Chomsky
>admits he's stupid
Ultimate refutation achieved
That's a very post-modernist way of admitting you're retarded
The guy even says that this game mentioned in this paragaph is unfair however. And I've read the whole interview he links at the beginning. Derrida is being a tad too wordy and show-offy but he mostly makes sense. His answer to the second question is very much in line with Habermas' while also sounding a lot like what many specialist of security were saying at the time. His style is perhaps grating but there is nothing jarring here.
The two passages are themselves not that hard to tell without having read Derrida, as the author himself admits:
>I think that if you know even a little bit about Derrida, you should be able to distinguish between the original and the variant, and thus show that Derrida can sometimes aspire to being, if only in tone, "even wrong". As he is here, in my opinion.
TL;DR: If that is the best anti-POMO (assuming postmodernism here and not some silly acronym as the useless capitalization suggests) texts you can find then postmodernism sounds not any less legit than most philosphy since Descartes.
Sentences with no context make little sense, wowzers!
>Think not that I am come to send war on earth: I came not to send war, but an olive branch.
Sounds pretty Jesus-like, no?
>In that it gives expression to this moment of its own conscious creation, and thereby expresses the result of its experience, it shows itself to be this inner enrichment of itself, to be consciousness becoming rational, its own essence being immediately essence, its reality immediately reality.
Very Hegelian, amirite?
Also, it's obvious the second passage is Derrida's and I haven't even read any of his stuff.
>Dude i just don't get it so it's trash
Incredible argument.
Is this the philosopher who doesn't understand dialectical logic?
yes this is an analytic philosopher
I got it right. I’m not an expert, but I’ve read a couple of things by Derrida. All it takes is a cursory familiarity with his rhetoric and ideas. “Beyond” is the key word.
Pomo BTFO BTFO’d.
Chomsky is a fucking genius. Linguist fags and IT fags know this. But he is a genius in thinking like a mathematician. Ofcourse he doesnt get faucault. He is very good at linear, rigorous thinking but not so much at seeing the bigger picture. He has a mathematicians mind. To understand faucault you need to think less microscopical and focus on the bigger picture (same for hegel, which is why math fags cant get into hegel). I am god awful at thinking in small linear steps (I could never be a scientist/mathematician) but I am decent at thinking in broad associations. His arguments against postmodernists are very reductionist because thats how he views the world, hacked into tiny pieces (like a good STEM fag). A postmodernist piece only works in summ total. He misses the forest because he spergs out about one tree.
>forest
arboreal metaphor, not even thinking rhizomatically yet
on the real though, your ego will never allow you to see you've at the end of the day wasted countless hours "deciphering" nothing, coming out of it more clueless than you began.
The metaphor was sufficient. If you dont get it, thats on you. I assume you didnt, otherwise you wouldnt have brought up the (in this context), completely irrelevant rhizomatic bullshit. You just looked at an excuse to flex your deleuzian half-knowledge.
>on the real though, your ego will never allow you to see you've at the end of the day wasted countless hours "deciphering" nothing, coming out of it more clueless than you began.
wew lad, you are projecting a lot today
This is perfectly valid as a test and I'm a pomo continental fag. I wouldn't trust a single graduate student who claims to work with Derrida (or whoever) to actually understand his ideas, in the sense of the genuine systematic understanding necessary for operationalizing them. You know, the kind of fucking understanding grad school is supposed to teach you as a specialist with special intellectual skillsets.
I wish I could bottle the specific experience of being in a room full of people who all think they understand something, led by a professor who thinks he understands it, and nobody understands it. Derrida is surrounded by a weird aura of dilettantes whose passion for his ideas is inversely proportional to their real understanding of it. Lots of women who are absolutely convinced that they are card-carrying Derrideans but who can't explain what this means.
The thing is, this is mostly the occasional dilettante nowadays, but back in the '80s and '90s, Derrida was the big fancy buzzword everyone was pretending to like. Why? Because fun fact: he was practically exiled from Europe and had to come and build his celebrity status in America, a fact he didn't like, so he spitefully taught only in French at the dinky university that actually wanted him. The cult of American johnny come latelies to French pomo was just kicking off right about when Deleuze was killing himself and Foucault was already dead from AIDS, but that's just when it was Derrida's time to shine! This bloom of dilettantes is what Chomsky is reacting to here, not Derrida's actual ideas.
And it's Derrida's own fault. He's honestly very simple, conceptually, as long as you understand the philosophical tradition he's coming out of. It's his gay Parisian desire to be "known" as a foppish essayist and aphorist that caused him to write terribly and write too much.
Chomsky is definitely philosophically illiterate though. Big time. The exchange between Searle and Derrida is much more interesting and even that isn't all that interesting.
What are Derrida's ideas?
>putting things out of context make them difficult to judge
>asking fanboys instead of scholars to judge one's work clearly
It's like the Sokal affair but somehow made more stupid.
wasn't there a better version of the sokal affair more recently, where it was in peer reviewed journals?
>dude chaos theory lmao
>topology
"far from equilibrium"
sokal was right
You going to explain how you think the terms are being misapplied or just wank yourself?
Where is this from? It's a legit exciting read
How does Chomsky compare to Peterson in destroying Post-Modernists?
This is a pretty good and relatively short lecture that explains Derrida in simple terms.
The most difficult question in philosophy is how the pissing hell is Chomsky still alive. Hes like 110.
Feel free to prove him wrong, my learned friends. Even just by explaining what Postmodernism is.
kys
he's 90, 91 this december
>Life is like riding a bicycle, if you keep moving you won't fall off
He would understand Deleuze if that were the case
Draining young boys with his MIT friends
Postmodernism is a term used once by Lyotard and then hijacked by American acdemia as a wrap-up term for a variety of French philosophies and doctrines developed in the second half of the 20th century. It has no dogmatic unity and the people wrapped up under that term don't agree with each other, so it doesn't constitute a philsophy proper, it's more of a loose category.
Thinkers associated with postmodernism tend to share a defiance towards usual modes of knowledge production in academia and a focus on how the material and intellectual conditions of modernity have reshaped society at large.
It is also the name of a related artisic and literary current (though again, a loose one), because why use a sloppily defined label once when you can do it twice? Key feature of said current is skepticism towards the modernism conception of art as avant-garde and innovative and its naive pretension to fundamentally transform art by formal innovation.
>a theory is bad because it gets widely misused by retards
lotta french postmodernists where vague pretentious cunts, which leads to their stuff being rather hard to read (and easy to misinterpret) but that does not make their ideas less valid
>Sounds pretty Jesus-like, no?
No.
Interesting take. I'm inclined to belive given the little I've read of and about Derrida.
There have been a mathematical version of the Sokal affair, amusingly. A complete nonsense article published in a math journal. Of course it was a Chinese scam journal with no peer-reviewing (but the journal Sokal targeted wasn't peer-reviewed either).
I can bet "Jesus partisans" aka 90% of Christians would not be able to tell if that was a real quote or not.
>In a letter to The New York Times, Cornell physics professor Paul Ginsparg wrote that the contrast between the cases was plainly evident: "here, the authors were evidently aiming to be credentialed by the intellectual prestige of the discipline rather than trying to puncture any intellectual pretension." He added that the fact some journals and scientific institutions have low or variable standards is "hardly a revelation".
Here it's clearly not used in the mathematical sense. The term "topos" is sometimes used in literary analysis to mean "common trope, cliché, common figure of thought or language" (in French a common equivalent is "lieu commun", literally "common place", which conveys the same idea since "topos" is Greek for "place").
As for "far from equilibrium": this simply means, very unbalanced, constantly changing, not fixed or determined by constant relations between its core elements. This is very straightforward, mind also that Deleuze's words are translated from French here. In French "équilibre" is a pretty common word.
The rest of the text is also pretty clear (the Deleuze part is crystal-clear, the Lacan part is a bit harder but still very readable), you'd have to be a brainlet not to at least get the gist of it.
user even highlithed the important passages for your convenience.
I feel very sad for Sokal that his name will forever be associated with his idiotic little affair in which he basically didn't prove anything, rather than on his mathematical and physical work.
If a giant like John Tate had done the same it would have become "John Tate, the great mathematician who also had issues with postmodernism". But in this case it's "Sokal, that guy who tried to BTFO postmodernism and also did some physics".
No mention of chaos theory here, you're the one misinterpreting physics. A system out of equilibrium is not necessarily a chaotic system.
Interesting, particularly the first four posts. Any other recs recommendations on that?
>here, the authors were evidently aiming to be credentialed by the intellectual prestige of the discipline rather than trying to puncture any intellectual pretension.
I'm talking about cases of real mathematicians pubishing mock-articles in journals to show how low their standards are, not about people abusing scam journals to get funding.
>He added that the fact some journals and scientific institutions have low or variable standards is "hardly a revelation".
The very same argument could be used for postmodernists journals. If his purpose is to argue that those scams don't invalidate mathematical research as a whole, fair enough, but you could likewise claim the Sokal affair proves nothing about the general state of postmodernism (to the extent postmodernism is even a unified school of inquiry). Sokal published in Social Texts, a journal without peer-review that pretty much nobody cares about.
Btw it's not just "some" journals and scientific institutions that have low standards for publication. In some fields the problem is endemic, and subpar or dubious articles sometimes even make their way to nature. If one really want to promoty scientific integrity one should really start with adressing the current state of publication standards in sociology, psychology, neurology, biology and applied statistics.
nobody can explain the big picture of these authors either
fuck off
>even Foucault, whom I knew and liked
Cope. He got btfo’d In their debate.
Generally this is a just cope in not engaging the arguments so as to not lose. Like “don’t give battle to the enemy when defeat is certain” from Sun Tzu.
>I don't get it so it must not be true
>I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true
Failed the shit test there, Chomsky
LMAO
No need to feel shame and overcompensate for low IQ. It takes all kinds.
Why do critics periodically proclaim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty: no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about postmodernism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than another admitting shamefacedly that he does not have the luck to have been initiated into the philosophy of the Extraordinary
All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.
One mimics silliness in order to make the public protest in one's favour, and thus carry it along advantageously from complicity in helplessness to complicity in intelligence.
My maths teacher was still talking about Fermat's last theorem a few years ago, so pretty sure it's still unproven
is this from barthes' essay "blind and dumb criticism" lel based
Shame for what? Chomsly is simply not very convincing in his dismissal here. He simply sounds like he's commenting on a tradition too different from his own to be able to judge.
Sucks to be of the same species as them, then.
Is this (part of) what you were referring to?
>Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon tandfonline.com
bye bye chomsky honk