this thread is awful

I've kinda enjoyed lurking on this thread. It's a thorny issue--on the one hand I quite like the idea of the 'free marketplace of ideas' and free speech and diversity of thought and public sphere and rational debate and all that stuff. But the critique that this can be easily co-opted by ethno-nationalist ideological forces who don't give two shits about any of this stuff and would destroy it given half the chance can't be ignored. So, to no-platform or not to no-platform? No-platforming appears to undermine the public sphere of rational debate, but not no-platforming also appears to undermine the public sphere of rational debate!

I think the only way to really make progress with this quandary is through large-scale data analysis. This is really a question about information spread. Assuming a fascist does get a platform, would no-platforming really stop a spread of fascist information? It might do. Not giving space for fascists to air their ideas makes sense. It might not. Fascists using 'muh free speech' memes to turn no-platforming into a platform for their ideology also seems plausible.

It's not a question that can be answered solely by following through the logic of liberal philosophy, nor can it be answered by a critique of the logic of liberal philosophy. The only way to answer it is to gather data about how information spreads (harvest all opinion pieces, youtube comments, tweets etc. about lobster daddy, Shapooro, Spencer, all comments related to them, model an 'information space' using graph theory, use computational linguistics to make distinctions between different kinds of memes, sentiments etc., track the spread of ideas between nodes). Only then can one have a clear picture of the circumstances which allow dangerous ideas to spread.

google scholar search about information spreading processes:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=information+spreading+process&btnG=&oq=infor

Like I said in my previous posts, I think there is much that is valuable in 'postmodern' thinking, I don't even think agreeing with people like Foucault or Derrida is necessarily inconsistent with advocating a scientific method and I don't think of this method as restricted to the positivist hypothetico-deductive method or naive philosophical realism. I was talking more about the habits of English departments rather than 'postmodern' thinking itself.

The so-called 'postmodernists' won't be there forever, the borg will assimilate their uniqueness in time (I hope). As for Shakespeare...

Mega corpus of criticism/writing about Shakespeare since tudor times + systems theoretical understanding of society + computational linguistics = detailed picture of how the concepts used in interpreting Shakespeare have changed since tudor times and the social mechanisms which relate to these changes = detailed picture of how the meaning of Shakespeare's texts themselves have changed since what this meaning is is simply the sum of its interpretations (perhaps throw in some ML analysis of a Shakespeare corpus too).

I suppose I should have said the future of Eng lit ought to be in ML/comp linguistics + systems theory. That being said, digital humanities is a field which is both growing in the UK and Europe and is interested in using machine learning, as is cultural analytics in Canada. Big data is only going to become more relevant so I wouldn't be surprised if these (currently small) fields end up influencing all the humanities. Of course it won't happen overnight.

As (I think) Joshs implies, 'postmodernism' is more of a pointless buzzword than a useful organising category that groups together thinkers with disparate ideas. The term seems to include everything from scepticism about conceptual categories (Derrida, Foucault -- though again I think these guys only go so far as to say assigning truth or falsehood to statements depends as much on how we construct statements about the world as much as whether those statements really 'correspond' with reality. This is not tantamount to absolute relativism.) to essentialism about conceptual categories (as in the dodgier side of identity politics). It's become even more useless as a term ever since Lord Lobster Daddy became popular with his pOsTmOdErN nEoMaRxIsM conspiracy theory.

Some of these people use obscurantist language (Baudrillard), some of them don't (Foucault, despite his giant sentences, is not that bad). The worst 'postmodernists' do tend towards absolute relativism. But this shouldn't be an excuse to dismiss the great range of thinkers who are shunted under the 'postmodern' label, which is basically what happens when one says postmodernism per se is bad writing and absolute relativism.

In response to the thread title: 'postmodern' thinking (by which I mean a hodgepodge of poststructuralist linguistics, 'continental' philosophy, Marxism (Frankfurt School, structuralist, and more orthodox variants), cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and so on) has become big in English Literature departments as a reaction against what was dominant before, which was even worse than the current so-called 'postmodern' paradigm. Before texts were treated as autonomous, self-referential objects which had little relation to the mechanics of society. At least under the current paradigm academics think about texts as things whose meanings are dependent upon social factors.

Personally I do think the current paradigm could do with a lot more scientific method, and I think the future of English literature probably lies in machine learning/computational linguistics combined with social systems/complex systems theory. But there is much of value to be mined from so-called 'postmodernism'.

While the writing style of people like Derrida is extremely frustrating, I don't think its fair to characterise postmodernism as attacks against reason/logic/truth--rather their position is better characterised as against the idea that reality is directly accessible. To some extent, reality is constructed through language, social structures and so on. There may be something that exists independently from us, but we only know about it by constructing a picture of it in terms of things like language, and the rules which govern how we assign truth and falsehood depend upon the manner of construction as much as the picture's correspondence with the independent object. It's more 'anti-direct-access' rather than anti-truth.

Important to note that this is not the same as saying that all ways of 'constructing' reality are equally valid--one can still hold that some ways of 'constructing' reality are better than other ways (e.g. one might hold that 'construction' using the scientific method is more practical than other methods of 'construction'). So it's also unfair to say that postmodern philosophy/linguistics is a form of naive relativism, as is often charged. (Though of course there are, as with every academic tradition, hacks who do go down the path of absolute relativism)

It's also not so inconsistent with more scientific views--Paul Cilliers wrote a book called 'Complexity and Postmodernism' which persuasively argues that the logic of, for example, Derrida's linguistics is consistent with that of the connectionist principles used to understand things like neural nets.