Are you basing the second paragraph on your understanding in the first? Because it doesn't follow. CLS wasn't appealing to an innate ethnocentrism in isolated groups; he was compelling external societies to keep away for the sake of diversity. — Kenosha Kid

There was a pessimistic vibe in CLS -- and a prescient one at that, having 70 years ago predicted ecological doom by way of overpopulation and overdevelopment -- which optimist humanists tended to hate, not see, or misrepresent.

Toute création véritable implique une certaine surdité à l’appel d’autres valeurs, pouvant aller jusqu’à leur refus, sinon même à leur négation. Car on ne peut à la fois se fondre dans la jouissance de l’autre, s’identifier à lui et se maintenir différent. Pleinement réussie la communication intégrale avec l’autre condamne, à plus ou moins brève échéance, l’originalité de sa et de ma création.

CLS, Race et culture, 1971

Ethnocentrism is to be understood as the equivalent in ethnography of Enstein's relativism: any and all human being will perceive other cultures from the prism of her own culture, and will tend to defend and promote her own culture more often than not. It is a universal phenomenon.

That's the obscene bit, not the destruction of the planet? — Kenosha Kid

The destruction of our environment is a tragedy, far worse than a mere obscenity.

Modo?

Seems to me modernism never finished... — Manuel

As an ideology, modernism is non-dead in the sense that there are still some folks who believe that science, technology and western democracy will save us from the doom they themselves engendered (climate change). And other folks pretend to believe it because the narrative suits their short-term interest. So modernism a zombie idea, like communism or christianism.

What we need now is what Lévi-Strauss might have labelled post-humanism: the understanding that the human race is its worst enemy, that it was a mistake to cast ourselves outside of nature, that we are animals and depend on other animals and plants, that our future survival as a civilization is threatened by too much emphasis on human needs and fancies, and not enough respect for other species' right for survival.

The present century will be when the CO2 shit hits the climatic fan. We don't have much time.

CLS made it quite rock-'n'-roll — Kenosha Kid

He did. Let me come back to what he was saying about race, and how it is relevant to postmodernism and to your question about how it could ever become a dominating discourse.

According to Wiktor Stoczkowski, a historian of anthropology, the two contributions by CLS to the debate on racism under the aegis of UNESCO were perfectly coherent. The basic message was that collaboration between different civilizations is the engine of history.

And it is here that we touch the absurdity of declaring one culture superior to another. For, insofar as it stands alone, a culture could never be superior [because its development would slow down very much] ... But - as we said above - no culture is alone; it is always given in coalition with other cultures, and this is what allows it to build cumulative series [i.e. cumulative history].

(my translation from: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000005546 -- see also https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-2010-4-page-485.htm for an article by Wiktor Stoczkowski on the topic)

The main argument of Lévi-Strauss’ Race et histoire in 1952 — namely that human progress is linked to a universal “aptitude … to establish mutual exchanges with others” — lined up well with the ideology of cooperation, whose propagation UNESCO wished to promote. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss’ 1971 intervention emphasized "the right of every culture to remain deaf to the values of the Other" as a condition for cultural creativity, and this clashed with the programme of “educational action on a world-wide scale” that UNESCO wanted to deploy to combat racism. Hence the scandal.

Lévi-Strauss was therefore fighting at UNESCO for the rights of the 'primitive' to be left alone by Western civilization, to be protected from it (including from UNESCO itself). He prophetized that globalization - if it was to result in one unique world culture - would kill human creativity, precisely because he saw exchanges between different culture as positive.

The paradox he highlighted in his argument was that ethnocentrism is universal. Each culture believes it is 'special' and 'better' than the others, at least in certain ways. And each culture tries to preserve itself, while incorporating interesting elements from other cultures. This is not a bad thing. Rather, it is the sine qua non condition for future creativity, for the historical agency of nations and cultures.

This lead CLS to both appreciate cultural 'métissage' as an engine of 'progress' or at least evolution (CLS did not actually believe in progress) and yet to warn against too much cultural 'métissage', as it could destroy cultural diversity.

Nowadays, everybody is familiar with the need to protect cultural diversity. But as the pendulum has moved away from universalism, the need for exchange and métissage between cultures is now de-emphasized. It's called 'cultural appropriation' and is seen as a bad thing. This is obviously a pretense, a form of hypocrisy, and one that CLS did not appreciate one bit. Today's 'metanarrative' is that the West is (by default) wrong and guilty, and other cultures are always right and wonderful. All the while, Western capitalism is destroying the planet and our common future, and those academics who meekly condemn Western cultures bask in the limelight of their self-disgust and enjoy the material comfort they provide... It's downright obscene.

I think a lot of people think of postmodernism as post-everything social constructivists WHO ARE RUINING EVERYTHING when a) they're not nearly free enough from their own metanarratives to qualify and b) postmodernism is first and foremost a description of the present in context of the past, and only after that a prescription (can't be a totalitarian proscription) for the future. — Kenosha Kid

My own diagnostic is more pessimistic: I believe that any school or tradition of philosophy that captures enough of the public's and academia's attention is liable to degenerescence over time, due to too much security and not enough challenge. Power corrupts. Money, or automatic tenure too. German idealism, English analytic philosophy, 'French theory', they all fell victim to their own academic success.

Then why do they want to change me?!? — Kenosha Kid

I called them and they confirmed that they want you to stay exactly as you are. The red lumps are but a minor side effect to their accessing your blood stream; hope you don't mind too much. Thanks for your continued support to their reproduction cycle.

is postmodernism a totalitarian narrative? In other words, can an argument for a diversity of discourses be a dominating discourse? I'd say: only if you're doing it wrong. — Kenosha Kid

That's a question that resonates both with the current post-truth moment and with the little piece of philosophy history I have wanted to add to the puzzle.

It's about structuralism or rather, since I never thought very highly of the term 'structuralism', about the contribution of Claude Lévi-Strauss and more broadly ethnology to the issue of cultural diversity vs. universalism.

You started your OP on the following para:

The 'postmodern condition' was coined to describe the fall of metanarratives after the two world wars (or between them, depending on what you count). The story goes something like this... — Kenosha Kid

The OP goes on to describe a broad historical arch, in which (in short) the horrors of the two world wars led to a form of western self-disgust, to spreading doubts in said metanarratives, and to decolonization. Pomo would have diagnosed this historical condition, or alternatively reenforced it.

I agree with your description and congratulate you for it. Nice synthesis. But I think an important piece is missing between WW2 and the rise of Pomo: the story of Levi-Strauss' interactions with and contributions to UNESCO on the issues of racism after WW2.

When you speak of the horrors of the two world wars, you mean (or I hear) the horrors of racism, ultra nationalism, and the Holocaust: the mobilisation of science and technology to murder entire nations on an industrial scale.

We must remember that racism was politically correct before WW2, and politically useful in justifying colonisation. Many European scientists, philosophers, medical doctors, political activists etc. before WW2 were casually racist. The 'white race' was typically seen as the pinacle of human genetic evolution, and Europe as the pinacle of cultural evolution. Other 'races' and nations were seen as evidently inferior, genetically and/or culturally, reason for which Europe was able to colonize them. That metanarrative was fundamentally ethnocentrism and racist, and a lot of European academics - right or left - were just fine with it, not just Heidegger.

Yet WW1 had already put a dent on it. Ergo dadaism and surrealism can be seen as reactions against grand but bloody nationalistic, colonial and scientistic discourses. E.g. the love of 'native arts' by the surrealists is a way of saying: "Europe is full of itself but Africans are artists too, 'savages' have an important culture too."

By that time, between the two WW, ethnographers / anthropologists were starting to say the same thing. It was a science which originally had served colonisation well: the colonizer needed to understand the colonized, in order to better control and rule him, and ethnographers were commissioned to do this decrypting of the colonized. There was also the idea that ancestral customs would disappear quite fast thanks to colonization and you know, the inevitable progress of the one and unique form of civilization (European). So these ancient customs had to be documented before they disappear.

The problem was, these people (ethnographers) often fell in awe with the cultures they were documenting. And many of them started to argue against colonization. Leiris is a case in point.

All this changed radically after the Holocaust. Racism was suddenly seen as downright evil, and the very concept of race was being redefined or denied validity. The recently created United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), headquartered in Paris, saw this fight against racism as it main mission.

In the early 1950's UNESCO published its statement on race as a social construct and the essay Race and History by Claude Lévi-Strauss. LS had contributed to the UNESCO statement on race, together with other scientists and academics. Two decades later, in 1971 Levi Strauss gave a conference at UNESCO entitled Race and Culture, which made a nice little scandal.

Historically this sequence fits right in between WW2 and the rise of Pomo in the late 60's. (There's an epilogue in 2005 but it doesn't add much, it's a mere confirmation of points already made in 52 and 71). The story is analysed in some detail here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4326674/

The two papers (Race and History + Race and Culture) competently build upon modern genetics and ethnography, and draw the same broad picture of a world threatened by a fake form of universalism.

TBC...

The mosquitoes near my house are very misanthropic, and I have red lumpy legs to prove it. — Kenosha Kid

On the contrary, your red lumpy legs indicate that mosquitoes like you quite a lot.

Engineering is a social construct too. — ssu

Pretty much everything on earth is. Even the landscape in most places is anthropic.

Well that's one value, and one that science has done very well out of despite the Sokals of the world. — Kenosha Kid

And occasionally, thanks to the Sokals of this world. As you recognized, it's important to minimize the level of bullshit. It cuts both ways: humanities can occasionally humble scientists and scientists (such as Sokals) can occasionally humble humanities... :-)

If facts are critical -- and we agree that they are -- then it is all the more important that we minimise the bullshit in our narratives about those facts. — Kenosha Kid

But pomo isn't limited to science, it's any text or discourse.

Sure. Even Derrida himself can be deconstructed.

Science is most definitely a social construct. Personally this doesn't injure my ego any: I had no illusions that science was anything other than something people do, disseminated via language. Perhaps your conception is closer to divine revelation. — Kenosha Kid

LOL. Evidently science is a social construct, but
it is constructed via a certain method, which combines observations, hypotheses building aka modeling, and sharing and critiquing. Not everything goes. One has to anchor one's models in observations aka facts.

In terms of literature, scientists also call it "the literature" — Kenosha Kid

Ok, I edited my text to say scifi instead of literature.

Not only do I agree with you that empirical validation is essential, I'd say that postmodernism has nothing at all to say about facts generally, and Rorty agrees. It only concerns texts, including texts about facts. If facts are critical -- and we agree that they are -- then it is all the more important that we minimise the bullshit in our narratives about those facts. — Kenosha Kid

This I agree with. That is precisely the value of Pomo to me: to make scientists (and others) better aware of the permanent presence of cultural a priori and biases in their own mind, as unsaid, unarticulated présuppositions, as these permeates their work more that they sometime should. Hence I am also totally in favour of diversity at school, work and politics, including in my own work.

No time now but intends to bring a piece of historical data to buttress your OP sometime later.

Good for you.

Once again I am not anti-pomo, I'm rather sympathetic to a lot of what they say. I just think it is unwise to reject empirical validation (or refutation) as it turns philosophy into a freewheeling imaginative discourse. I see the idea by Rorty et aliquem (e.g. Quine, so it was not just a pomo idea) that we should dispose of a representationalist account of knowledge and language as literally beyond philosophy and science, as an invitation to treat philosophy and science as just another branch of scifi.

What he proved is that a leading pomo journal could not distinguish sense from nonsense. And that's a fact.

But factuality / empirical evidence was absent from your criteria for making sense... So what am I supposed to tell you about diversity? Non factual stuff? A mix of facts and non facts?

You see, you keep avoiding my question of what constitutes the boundaries of sensical discourse. It's hard for me to make sense to you if I don't know what makes sense to you.

The threat of 'science being undermined' was just never credible imo — Kenosha Kid

That was precisely Sokal's position, that pomo does NOT represent a significant threat to science at all. Rather, he saw it as corrosive to the credibility and sanity of the political left, as I think @Josh said already.

This isn't a pomo distinction, it's just the distinction between sense and nonsense. — Kenosha Kid

A distinction which is now blurred in modern gender studies, queer studies, fat studies, etc. i.e. the industry of grievience studies stemming from Pomo.

I note the absence of factuality / empirical evidence in your list... Was that intentional?

Personally, I would count clarity of expression as a criteria to distinguish sense from nonsense. As Boileau once put it:

Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.

(What is well conceived is expressed clearly
And the words to say it should come easily)

The verses above have been drilled in every French pupil ever since Boileau, for good reasons. If you can't express yourself clearly and succinctly, you don't really know what you're talking about.

Another criteria I use is whether the text is logically coherent, internally, and logically argued. Likewise the logical consequences of the thesis are important to consider.

Originality of thought is another key criteria for me. I hate to spend time reading banal yada yada. And what's the point of writing things everybody already knows about?

Yet another is appropriate referencing of authors who influenced one's work. It's fine to climb on the shoulders of giants but do quote the giants once in a while.

Last but not least, whether the text resonates with my own experience or bring verifiable evidence is key. Empirical evidence does apply to a lot of what philosophers talk about, metaphysics aside.

Then yes, in my opinion. — Kenosha Kid

Okay, so how would you make this distinction between sensical Pomo and nonsensical one? What criteria would you use?

I am asking for your opinion on the matter. Or anybody else's for that matter.

Can a distinction be made between nonsense and sense in a postmodernist framework? Because it's not clear to me that there can be such a thing.

The end result is, irrespective of the platform, Sokal authored a nonsense paper, which is what he's remembered for. And rightly so. — Kenosha Kid

Still, the question remains: what passes for nonsense and what doesn't, in a Pomo frame?

I'm not against Pomo as a whole, just curious about what constitute quality standards in a Pomo framework. I'd be at a total loss if I was asked to peer review something as freewheeling as what passes for good 'queer studies' or what not. Maybe you know by what standards Pomo texts are assessed?

Sokal got his paper rejected from several journals before finding one stupid enough to publish it. — Kenosha Kid

Do you have evidence of that?

I don't think it says much of anything at all other than Sokal was an arsehole with a conservative axe to grind and Social Text had trouble unpacking his paper and ill-advisedly published it anyway.

Sokal is a leftist, and he's not an arsehole.

Such hoaxes are useful, if only to put reviewers and publishers on notice that they'd better work diligently.

A list of academic hoaxes:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings

I am saying that Foucault didnt understand Derrida based on my own reading of both Foucault and Derrida. — Joshs

I never read Derrida so I cannot really comment. Just wanted to point out that Pomo should not be taken a coherent doctrine or school of thought, as evidenced by this opposition between him and Foucault.

Would you have an example of a specific point that Derrida made and Foucault misunderstood?

Also, would you mind pointing me to a Derrida text that you find clear and insightful?

by the late 60's something happened that made many of the French intellectuals write poorly. — Manuel

I blame Althusser for this.

France used to be different, they strove for clarity as seen in Descartes, Diderot and so on. — Manuel

There are still very clear French writers. Camus' style was more than clear: elegant but direct, and even sometimes blunt in making the case. I find Edgar Morin perfectly clear. Barthes is ok, Beauvoir was limpid.

Rest assured that not every French philosopher tries to impress his or her audience with jargon, and I'm pretty sure there exist arcane charlatans in English-language philosophy too.

Semipomo — Kenosha Kid

Pomo is seen in France as a post-structuralist movement, more dynamic in its thinking, more historical, seeing structures as fluid and evolutive rather than carved in epistemic marble.

Foucault, Deleuze & Eco I'd found were worth the trouble; — 180 Proof

Umberto Eco? I love him but never saw him as Pomo... ?

Personally I agree with the (or one of the) basic diagnostic of postmodernism, in summary that science as a form of social activity is liable to echo chambers and cultural biases. This realisation -- in my opinion -- was true, but became perverted and excessive. I also believe that it gave a 'script' to powerful economic lobbies trying to pervert scientific knowledge in their favour: the tobacco industry, and more recently the oil industry managed to engineer doubt, by funding specific scientists who doubted (or said they doubted) the scientific consensus on tobacco causing cancer, or climate change respectively. I don't think such manipulation of scientific discourse was happening before Pomo. Maybe I'm wrong, but the idea is that the current post-truth moment is a child of Pomo.

I should really read Fashionable Nonsense.

Note that Badiou was also the target of an academic hoax à la Sokal. On April fool's day, 2016, two French philosophers, Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse, announced that they were the authors of an article titled "Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non)Being-Queer", published in the peer-reviewed Badiou Studies (sic) and signed by an imaginary Benedetta Tripodi. The article was just a bunch of BS couched in Badiousan language.

Searle admired Foucault. And Foucault was a brilliant thinker. His critique of Derrida is that obscurity is a way to avoid critique and accountability, because it makes it facile to say that the critique 'does not understand'. He did not say that any and all of Derrida is books was worthless, but that Derrida was too facile in his rejection of other philosophers' critique.

That's the main problem I personally see with some pomo texts and authors, which tend to think 'en roue libre' (free wheeling) i.e. without subjecting their thought to empirical refutation or critical analysis. Too facile.

France has moved on, I think. — Manuel

Yes. Even Foucault is pretty much buried nowadays, nobody studies him much in France, although he was clearly not a charlatan. Deleuze is an exception in that he is still considered 'current', I believe for good reasons. Badiou is also still around, but I don't know much about him. Seems to me that he is better known in the US, like Derrida.

Parisian pomo's — Manuel

I would like to note that, for better or worse, postmodernism never got in France the echo it got in the US, where it became dominant in humanities. See the excellent French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, by François Cusset.

Foucault could be quite clear

Agreed, and he lambasted Derrida's 'obscurantist terrorism', as reported by Searle.

It's a very cool album, Getz plays it super smooth and breezy. One of the most widely sold jazz album ever, it reached far beyond the usual jazz audience. It's been criticized as facile elevator music, but to me that is a bit unfair. I find it unpretentious but quite lovable.

Here is "Desafinado", meaning "Out of Tune", or as "Off Key". It was (again) composed by Antônio Jobim with lyrics (in Portuguese) by Newton Mendonça, and included in the Getz/Gilberto album:

Thank you Amity for your great spirit and entries.

The guy singing is Antônio Carlos Jobim himself, a very successful composer of popular Brazilian music. He wrote many songs, including some which you might be familiar with, such as the Girl From Ipanema, believed to be the second most recorded pop song in history (the first being "Yesterday" by The Beatles). It was a feature in that famous Getz/Gilberto bossa nova jazz album and was later covered by Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and countless others.

Here is the original version by Jobim.

The Waters of March (Portuguese: "Águas de Março" is a Brazilian song composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim in 1972. He wrote the lyrics both in Portuguese and in English. He sang the Portuguese version in a duo with Elis Regina. The English version was covered by Simon and Garfunkel.

In a 2001 poll by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo , Águas de Março was voted the best Brazilian song of all time by more than 200 Brazilian journalists, musicians and artists.

The inspiration for Águas de Março comes from the rainiest month in Rio de Janeiro with its sudden storms with heavy rains and floods.

The lyrics do not tell a story, but show a sequence of images as a collage ; almost every sentence begins with "É ..." ("It is ...").

The text and the music allude impressionistically on streams of rain that run down the gutter and pull things like the sticks, stones and broken glass mentioned with them.



It's a stick, a stone, it's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone
It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush
The nod of the wood, the song of a thrush
The wood of the wind, a cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all

It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of a slope
It's a beam, it's a void, it's a hunch, it's a hope
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March
It's the end of the strain, it's the joy in your heart

The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone
The beat of the road, a sling-shot stone
A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light
The shot of a gun in the dead of the night

A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump
It's a girl, it's a rhyme, it's a cold, it's the mumps
The plan of the house, the body in bed
And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud

Afloat, adrift, a flight, a wing
A cock, a quail, the promise of spring
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart

A point, a grain, a bee, a bite
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night
A pin, a needle, a sting, a pain
A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain

A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe
A fish, a flash, a silvery glow
And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March
It's the promise of life in your heart, in your heart

A stick, a stone, the end of the load
The rest of a stump, a lonesome road
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A night, a death, the end of the run

And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March
It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart

There MUST be published papers written with this thing. — hypericin

There were:

The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, and specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[4][5] Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[2]

The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

But all the songs
Tell the same story
There's always a boy
And a girl in despair
She calls him out
But he doesn't hear
He sees only her
But she doesn't see him

Films were made
And divine tragedies
Out of this situation
Rocks and spleen
Melodies that we hear everywhere:
[in English] Oh I need you baby
Baby yes I do

It's always "toujours"
That rhymes with... oh oh
This thing you have to guess:
My first is desire
My second, pleasure
My third is to suffer
And my whole you'll remember

She paints up her face
With pencils
He puts on earrings
To give himself a look
We want to please
We want to date
Then one day it's war
This game drives us mad

There's danger, there are victims
An assassin assassinates
This assassin you have to guess:
His first is desire
His second, pleasure
His third is to suffer, oh oh
And his whole, you'll remember

It's a teenager's blues
Nights spent dying of desire
Hanging on the hook of one's soul mate
In constant suspire

But all the songs
Tell the same story
This story you have to guess:
My first is desire
My second, pleasure
My third is to suffer oh oh ...

. I got the wrong end of the stick. — TheMadFool

That may be because you are an adventurous philosopher, a risk taking metaphysician.... :-) Better get it wrong once in a while than say nothing, or something amounting to nought.

Taking risk can be seen as a basic human need. It gives you "the thrill". You feel more alive, you will remember vividly what happened, will be able to tell countless stories that other people will listen to... Why do you think people climb the Everest or K2?

I did not.

Sitting there doing nothing does evoke boredom.