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Post-Modern History?
Maverick475
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Registered User regular
Being a college student, I often hear about post-modernism. At first all I knew about it was from that Simpson's episode where Moe makes a new "post-modern" bar. "Weird for the sake of weird" was the phrase used I think. Anyways, I've read several articles before about post-modernism and science: how physics is theory and maybe not truth, limits of knowledge, etc.. However, I've never thought about how post-modernism has affected other disciplines. Then my college decided to make all of us Education majors start a blog today for various reasons and one of the students posted an interesting post about post-modern history: http://insidestatues.blogspot.com/. Any of you out there have your own opinions about subjectivity and post-modernity and how it has effected your disciplines/interests?
I Bet Phone Psychics get depressed when they foresee that they will become phone psychics.
Maverick475 on
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Most of what post-modernists suggest/ed about History was already completely obvious to good historians.
Well, what po-mo is depends largely on the subject that is being discussed. Do you want to talk about that or more the general philosophical concepts which undergird much of it's general use?
For me, PoMo's influence in architecture and aestheticism has generally been to make rather expensive and elaborate in jokes among fellow architects. So when it isn't a travesty it's kind of interesting, but far from my cup of tea.
I hope that people will provide support and reasons for their feelings of post-modernity rather than just expressing support and disbelief/mistrust. I'm not trying to see simply how people feel, but why they feel as they do: their experiences.
@moniker: Well, won't both happen at the same time? By talking about what PoMo means in our own disciplines won't the differences and similarities be exposed? For example, you mention architecture and aestheticism. How has PoMo changed artistic fields? Would that involved more international styles and less adherence to modernist rules?
@zakkiel: Interesting story. The article I linked above spends time talking about how post-modernity makes peer review a very necessary thing in order to make sure articles are plausible in the face of subjectivity.
I feel like I just posted this -- oh wait, I did -- as a person who sees value in post-modernism, but sees its philosophical limits as well, I would recommend After Theory by Terry Eagleton as one of the better reasoned and fair evaluations of post-modern theory and its general fallout. Post-modernism's insights are undeniable, the problem is that they're also ultimately fruitless, so we have to figure out a way to work forward from the present.
In the discipline of English, post-modernism did an awful lot that I don't care to rehash here. Part of it was the author dying. That was kind of dumb.
Stating that science is theory is not, in fact, post-modernism. It's just "science". Or maybe semantics. But that has nothing to do with post-modernism.
I don't care about that. But "fact" insofar as science is concerned is just theory that cannot conceivably ever be disproven.
Anyway, I think you are erroneously conflating existentialism and post-modernism. I think the two may be third-cousins-twice-removed or something, but they are not the same thing.
No, actually PoMo architecture was produced in response to the 'International Style' and mid-century modernism. It is quite literally embedding buildings and designing them so as to make a joke. At least, in most cases. It's the reapplication of ornament, after its abrupt abandonment during the Modernist era. However it is applied in a way so as to ensure that it does not conform to the rational underpinnings which evolved throughout antiquity to modern times. I could give you some of the most famous or most glaring examples, or even a process of the evolution of the style from before it had a label to after it was adopted by Phillip Johnson of all people while explaining the joke/punchline.
As far as the broader aestheticism that PoMo is associated with, it's largely just getting 'important' people to accept the fact that art and aesthetics are subjective rather than pretending that it isn't the case. Doesn't really change anything, just means that more people are able to get into galleries or charge more exorbitant prices for their works than they may have otherwise been able to.
Well, it depends on the subject. In terms of English/Literature I can't talk at all, though I'm sure Poldy is on his way to fill that void, but in many others it's simply reaffirming what makes good history, good. Or good science, science. Some of the best documentaries point out to the audience the fact that they are documenting something from a particular point of view. That could be considered a post modern conceptual framework, or it could be considered being a responsible director. Acknowledging the sources for historical writings and how that influences the portrait being painted could be called a post modern precept, or it could be called not half assing it. &c.
And yeah -- we end up basically with what you're saying, but there's a back and forth, an ebb and flow. Some people embrace post-modernism to the point of nihilism. Some people reject it to the point of autocracy. There's a middle ground somewhere, but the first step is, at this point, justifying the first step. People have yet to agree an a total consensus for what or even why the first step of moving past it is necessary.
And like you're pointing out with architecture, the word means very different things in different disciplines, but gets lumped together and tossed around loosely because it was similar philosophical insights that led to simultaneous growth in a wide range of disciplines. Still, the word does not at all mean the same thing depending on who you're talking to, although it's likely to have similar underpinnings.
I'm guessing that being honest about biases or PoV is a product of post-modernism, not just good history. If this was already being done by all the 'good' historians then post-modernity won't have happened, it already would have been around. The fact that it exists implies that it wasn't always so.
For example, after reading the one blog post I did some reading into the classical historicism in Germany in the 20th century and guys like Ranke really thought that by looking at primary sources one could make a complete, objective recount of past events. Then Marc Bloch and Carlo Ginzburg and others started writing about how even primary sources are biased...
The theory having different meanings for different disciplines strikes me as a weakness rather than a mere source of confusion. Deconstructionism has taken on a sort of neo-Marxist status where philosophers and critics of art and literature try to shoehorn all manner of things under its umbrella. It certainly doesn't help that post-modern theorists and deconstructionists tend to embrace obscurantism and reject criticism as a lack of understanding rather than poor, subjective and pointless communication on their part.
In regards to the original post:
For psychology, post-modernism has mostly resulted in the field of cross-cultural psych. Depending on where one is coming from, cross-cultural psychology has taken the form of either tearing down traditional Western psychology (Psychoanalysis, behaviorist psychology or bio-psychology) or as a means of relentlessly running down universal psychological traits (support for evolutionary psychology or bio-psychology).
Oh sure, but I thought we were restricting the discussion to ___'s in the modern era/ turn of the 20th century on to the present. If you go back far enough history was simply another propaganda tool hardly any better than yellow journalism. In many respects some of it still is. However when people stopped trying to document the objective fact of antiquity and focused on recent or contemporaneous events multiple and conflicting accounts tended to be lumped together in order to flesh out a fuller picture of what occurred.
More saying that the two carry similar philosophical underpinnings, so it's hard to say what constitutes one and not the other.
While this is of course a broad, generalized, statement, no philosopher associated with postmodernism - rarely will you see the famous postmodern philosophers label themselves as postmodern - would say that Truth is unknowable. Rather, they would say that the category of Truth is a constructed one, which, depending on the philosopher, exists for wildly different reasons.
Ok, but the original (maybe, now I'm not sure where this is going) focus of the topic was how post-modernism has effected various disciplines so is your distinction really needed? Your comment really has more to do with the nature of post-modernism, which is related to the topic, but only to a point.
The concept of epistemology far predates post-modernism, and I've yet to find a decent scientist who does not understand the built in limits of our knowledge or the dangers of bias in scientific research.
Most prominent postmodern philosophers do not doubt the modal knowledge of science, but the near religious zealotry of scientificity -- that science is the only sure way of knowing what is real, and refuse to acknowledge the DEEP antithetical currents going on in science today.
I would pose a question for you: how would you describe technology?
I don't know quite what you're asking by the description of technology, though. I mean, in the most general sense? I'd say technology is a tool that a sentient actor utilizes for some purpose.
1) That post-modernism is bs because people already were aware of the limits of knowledge before PoMo.
2) What are the flaws of science?
To 1, I would say that perhaps bias and limits only seem so obvious because our whole lives have been in the post-modern era. The Enlightenment lasted a very long time, long enough that people really must have felt that reason and progress were unlimited.
To 2, I think that Podly seems to be making a different argument than those he is arguing with.
I believe that science isn't weakened by PoMo because science is still trying to be objective. Even if the objective truth, the way the universe is run, isn't obtainable it still exists. Science is a way to try and be as objective as possible in observation in order to get close to Truth. Just because we now admit certain limits doesn't mean that science still isn't the most objective.
Edit: I seem harsh, but History is kind of My Thing.
Why do you think that recognition of the limits of historical accounts predates PoMo? This isn't as a challenge to see whose right, I'm curious because I don't know much historiography and perhaps my limited exposure has mislead me, but what I do know points to PoMo as a turning point.
It really has nothing to do with "bias." You are missing the grand entire scope of the philosophical tradition, in which the subject-object relationship is centered upon the subject's relationship to the object, and the possibility of knowledge. What postmodern philosophers do is to examine the structure of this relationship, and what the relationship reveals about knowledge.
One of the best philosophers who uses this method is Foucault. Foucault attacks whiggish history: the notion that history is the story of progress. It was common at the time to of Victorian historians to examine history as the progress towards civilization. While this has fallen out, it still remains true in a lot of the social sciences. Sexuality is seen as healthy today whereas in the past it is was repressed; punishment today is enlightened while in the past it was barbaric; science today is write, but science of the past is wrong.
In his attempts to extricate these "biases," to use the catchall term thrown around in this thread, he uses technology as a point of entry in his examination of social structures. Discipline and Punishment is his most successful attempt. In it, he points out that we had, in about a 150 year period, transitioned from a penal system of torture to a penal system of correction. The apparent progress here seems positive. But through a detailed analysis, he shows that it merely increased the function of power in society, and that we are more under control, punished, and disciplined than ever before, because the technology of punishment shifted from the torture of the body to the subjectification of the soul by the use of psychologists, psychiatrists, prisons, surveillance, etc. (It is a very, very difficult book, and I would be glad to try and explain it more as best I can if anyone wants.)
What he does, in the end, is say that subjectivity is not something prior to relationships to objects -- and thus not a crisis of knowledge -- but that subjectivity is constructed through punishment, discipline, surveillance, and correction by power, and that knowledge is the impetus of technology to exercise power.
Well, I don't know much about Pliny or Plutarch, but isn't striving to eliminate biases a very objective, non PoMo want? The shift from trying to eliminate ones biases to then decided that is impossible and therefore we should be open about our biases instead is a big part of the transition from classical historicism to post-modern historicism.
I also wonder their relevance in this topic. Even if Greek historians had certain similarities with PoMo, they were pre-Enlightenment and so are not really part of this cycle, so to speak. At least to me it is an interesting connection and shows how conceptions of knowledge may swing back and forth, but they are mostly beside the point since they predate the context of PoMo by so much.
I have to address this.
The issue here is not that postmodernism is essentially problematic; the issue is that the journal in question was not reviewing its articles rigorously and didn't catch what was obvious parody.
Even so, analyzing the parody article is a fascinating thing in itself.
How does this connect to scientific thought and its commonly held position as the only gateway to "objective" or close-as-possible-to-objective truth?
Would Foucault suggest that scientific thought itself contributes to the problem of power, or that scientific thought becomes a tool of those systems of power?
Also re: the death of the author, mentioned earlier by GEM/ELM:
This is not "kinda stupid." It's pretty important, actually. The subject/object relationship that pomoism interrogates is present everywhere, and if you examine literature or art in general from outside of that relationship, you can come to some very valuable conclusions.
Also (hilariously), authors are often the worst people to ask about their own work for any number of reasons, from deliberate obfuscation to a complete inability to see the ideas they have subconsciously (or through assumption) included in their work.
Well, first of all, I would mention that "science today is right, science in the past is wrong" is a fundamental aspect of science. Science is necessarily progressive, theoretically as long as records of past theories and data exist we will only ever gain a more accurate picture of the universe as we move forward. That's not a bias, that's the way it works. It's almost guaranteed that science today is wrong in comparison to science in the future, our approximations of reality only get better (barring any significant set-backs).
Secondly, our gains in the technology of punishment is progress, if you realize that the end that they're actually progressing towards is greater control of dissidents. I mean, that's the reason punishment even exists, to control people. Value judgments about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing are inappropriate here. Technology only gets better at doing what it does, or else we abandon it. The fact that people might not realize what the technology is actually for is besides the point.
Historiography was undeniably affected by post-modern philosophical insights. The extent to which these insights overran and reshaped the history landscape v. simply subtly altering finer points of the approach is an obvious point of contention, but saying that post-modernism had no affect on the discipline of history is a misleading extreme all the same.
A text, ultimately, is a point of communication between two people. What the person means to convey v. what it actually conveys is a very legitimate relationship to explore. Going way beyond that into super philosophical realms with an imaginary vacuum of human hands touching the text you're interpreting is, and has proven, fruitless. We are people, who eat, breathe, shit, and die, talking to each other. That needs to be acknowledged somewhere.
@Mr.^2: Different philosophers would say different things. Heidegger, for instance, would say that the subject / object relationship is not of categorical definitions but rather existential ones.
@AJA: So, "rightness" is relative to temporality?
What are you driving at here? Science today is more accurate than it was in the past; there's no epistemological significance to that.