Item — HN Reader

Although I think we probably agree in most respects, I want to offer a slightly different perspective on some of the points you raised. While it has become a sort of trope to dismiss postmodernist texts as difficult (true) and obscurantist (here I disagree), there is usually a pretty good reason for why these texts are written a certain way. For example, Derrida's writing style is heavily linked to and inspired by the difficulty to pin down the blind spot that he thinks is always part of our metaphysical tradition. If you follow his 'argument' far enough to agree that there is no privileged outside from which we could see this blind spot (since this shift of perspective would then introduce another blind spot), then it absolutely makes sense to adopt his always-shifting, always-destabilizing mode of writing.

In technical fields, we usually expect people to immersive themselves in a particular vocabulary to be able to understand difficult technical books, yet in philosophy we often expect these texts to be readily accessible to laypeople. Why? Derrida's work emerged from a tradition heavily influenced by Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and others, all difficult authors in their own right. Of course we might find it disappointing that these texts are not accessible to the general public in a way that, say, Russell's popular writings were, but isn't that nevertheless an absolutely valid choice on the part of the author?

Also, it should be pointed out that the so called postmodernists were not the first to employ a very difficult writing style that we might on first glance perceive as obscurantist: Heidegger is a good example of someone who coined a ton of neologisms because he thought it necessary to escape the traditional discourse. You might not buy his argument (I'm not sure I do), but Heidegger felt he had a good reason to distance himself from the existing discourse.

Are the main texts of postmodernism dense and hard to understand? Sure. Should they be a required reading for everyone? Of course not. But I don't think they are necessarily negative and I don't agree that they have no 'recommendation for what anybody should actually do'. Even Derrida, arguably the most deconstructive and 'negative' of the bunch, can be applied in a myriad of 'positive' ways, this is doubly true for authors like Deleuze & Guattari, for example. I think it ultimately depends on whether you view a critique of political or social structures as purely negative. I would argue that such a critique offers an avenue for change, by enabling us to see the status quo as something that can be attacked, rethought and then reformed.

But those are just my 2 cents on why I like (some of) the postmodernist authors. I think it's absolutely fine if not everyone buys into their thinking, I would just wish for a more honest engagement before dismissing them out of hand.

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I agree with most of this. I don't think, though, that the obscurity of the postmodernist writers is just a matter of technical material not being accessible to non-specialists. There is a trickster and bullshitter element to what they were doing. The complicated aspect is that they were also expressing important truths.

The problem with the "always shifting always destabilizing" mode of a writer like Derrida is that it doesn't treat the listener as someone who matters. The listener is dispensable, while the author (ironically, the author who was supposed to have died) performs self-referential pirhouettes. There's something deeply non-relational about that, which I don't like. At the same time, I think the "nothing to see here" critics of the postmodernists are even more wrong.

Deleuze/Guattari is a different vein which I never really explored. I had a copy of Anti-Oedipus many years ago but I never really read it. It surprised me when they re-emerged as a fashionable item in the English-speaking world.

I want to suggest that you email Noam Chomsky in reply to his question here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeWWz4y1coU#t=34m58s

Chomsky spends hours every night answering everyone's emails because he thinks it's his duty. I wouldn't want to add to that load. Let him enjoy his new family and the Arizona sun or wherever he happens to be now.

The other thing though is that that is not a simple question. (Edit - the question in the video is: "Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false?") It has a trap door built in: the word 'triviality'. If you did find an answer, it would be easy to say it doesn't count because it's trivial. Doubly so because Chomsky already understands a lot of the same things about power and language—he has his own critiques of those, which are not identical with the postmodernists' but there are overlaps for sure—so a lot of that wouldn't strike him as new, just dressed up in pretentiousness. Triply so because if you have the mind of a Chomsky, most things are going to seem trivial anyway.

At a deeper level, Chomsky is an 18th century rationalist, so he's never going to accept a critique of the foundations of Enlightenment reason, and there's no single argument by which such critiques are conducted, let alone a single passage in a text that you can point to and say 'here it is'. Chomsky certainly understands this, so his question is really a bit of theater, a way of cauterizing a topic that he has been asked about incessantly for decades now and must find incredibly boring. He's so polite to the people who interview him, especially to naive questioners, that he doesn't show this directly, but you can see it in the charming way that he can't help but smile a tiny bit when he brings out his perfectly-crafted discussion-ending question. ("So that's about all I can say.")

I think a lot of what he's saying there (and in many other places where he's been asked about this) is more a matter of taste than real disagreement. To someone who values clarity of language and is a master of it, the gobbledygook of the postmodernists (which was mostly a concoction of a small intellectual scene in which people were competing on style) would seem godawful because it is, and would also seem like a huge distraction from things that matter.

I wouldn't want to reread the postmodernists. I did my time in grad school and came to dislike that material because it was so obscure, and because of the emporer's-new-clothes dynamic where everyone felt like they had to pretend to understand it because they were afraid of being the only one who didn't. The primary lesson I gained from that was how to be unafraid to ask a simple question. That's a powerful thing when no one else is willing to.

But what brought me around to respecting them was studying spiritual traditions whose critiques of human concept production are actually much closer to the postmodernists than anybody else. (Edit: I found an old comment where I wrote about this in more detail, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432). If you know anything about postmodernism, you know what an irony that is, because the postmodernists made a grand point of rejecting the language of spirit (e.g. presence, awareness, transcendence, anything higher) even more than they rejected the language of rationality. As a result, they end up with nothing. But if you become interested in looking at your own self-deception, nothing is a good thing to have. The conceptual solvents of postmodernism can be useful in that way, and as I said elsewhere in the thread: usually when people reject these things stridently, it's not because of what is wrong in them but because of what is right. (Another example is Freud, which is another story.) I wouldn't put Chomsky in that category though. I think he mostly just finds it uninteresting.

Thank you for this articulation. Sincerely made my day.