This sort of seems inevitable to me. What kept POMO on the left in the first place? The relativism it allows for allows it to be reformulated in right wing terms quite easily. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nick Land is not a relativist in the pomo sense of the term; he is not simply reformulating but missing the essential features of ideas by Deleuze , Derrida and others. If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point? I agree with you it is inevitable that any complex, difficult to understand new ideas will be misread in ways diametrically opposed to the intent of the author, but I sense that , given the fact that your own thinking differs from the ideas of figures like Kuhn, Derrida and Deleuze, you see unproductive elements in what you call pomo ‘relativism’ and therefore you dont think they’re being entirely misread by people like Nick Land.

That is, if we drop the notion of truth as a valid assessment of our utterances in favour of the will to power or some such, we are endorsing the powerful, reinforcing their hegemony.

Post modernism cannot speak truth, therefore it cannot speak truth to power. — Banno

Well, to my best understanding, post-modernists can speak fabricated truth to powers that likewise fabricate truths - without there being any right or wrong to it. It's one interpretation of the "Will to Power".

I personally view fabricated truths as deception - be it self-deception or otherwise - if not outright lies. But that's just me.

I personally view fabricated truths as deception - be it self-deception or otherwise - if not outright lies. But that's just me. — javra

Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? You wrote earlier that we all “consciously or unconsciously cling to some form of what Mircea Eliade termed an axis mundi”. Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’?

Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’? — Joshs

Tricky question in so far as I too am a construcitivst in many a sense, though by no means a radical relativist.

I'll use the notion of scientific progress as an example: to me, there can be no such thing - to include no Kuhnian paradigm shifts that in any way improve anything of our understanding - without there being an objective reality to be progressed toward via scientific investigations - one that is in and of itself true. (Granted, this to me requires a different metaphysical approach than either that of physicalism or of any notion entailing an Abrahamic deity as ultimate reality, to list just two.)

So appraised, while the Newtonian understanding of the physical world was and remains quite pragmatic for everyday purposes, it is nevertheless a false understanding of the physical world. This just as much as declaring the the sun revolves around the Earth is pragmatic for everyday purposes (such as is implied in sunrises and sunsets) but nevertheless false.

In the absence of a functional theory of everything regarding physicality, the same too can be hypothesized of the theory of relativity as it currently stands (nevertheless granting many a variation in its interpretation).

To me, then, if progress is in fact made from understanding A to understanding B, this then entails the (non-fabricated) truth that B is a better understanding than is A. That, though, does not then entail that understanding B is the (objectively) true understanding (if this notion is in any way intelligible). But it does entail that understanding A was then in some way faulty - and, in so being, it can then in this sense be declared false. This will however extend beyond a strictly bivalent notion of truth-value (for me, one that however still makes no use of dialetheism; one that nevertheless acknowledges partial truths, along with different vantages of reality to which these pertain).

Complex topic, but I think that summarizes my view. In short, if progress is in fact made, one's formerly held but now discarded understandings will be far more false - falser - that will be one's currently maintained understanding.

If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point?

I don't see where "blaming" comes into it, just the sense in which one is influenced by/comes out of the other. I do also find it worthwhile to distinguish between "misreadings," i.e., "this is obviously not what x passage says," and "readings the author would disagree with." Sometimes, author's premises and reasoning seem to lead directly to conclusions they would like to avoid. For example, it seems like there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Kant was aware that his work could be taken as promoting a sort of subjective idealism, and that he sought to rectify this. But I don't think people who read Kant as a subjective idealist are necessarily "misreading" him so much as pointing out ways in which is work supports conclusions he may have disliked.

Reading Kant as saying something like "ethics should be determined on a case by case basis, based on pragmatic concerns and utilitarian calculus," would be an obvious misreading. Differences between these two are not always very clear cut.

Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)

Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career. He got his PhD and then taught at an English-language hub of the general movement and published extensively drawing on Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille, Lyotard, and Lacan, was a PhD advisor in this setting, and led a cybernetic/cyberfeminist collective. The younger Land who gets described "Deleuzo-Marxist," and was able to have a successful career in this setting at a prestigious university totally misreading his peers seems like a hard claim to make. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.

Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. I recall reading an article recently that back in the 80s academics skewed 2:1 in favor of the left. Now it's closer to 10:1, and in the Harvard Crimson's review of that university's faculty it was 26:1. In Land's setting, it would probably be closer to 100%. He's living into transvaluation and norm challenging — birthing the "demon child" if you will — of course that means overthrowing core assumptions in your culture!

Costin Alamariu, or Bronze Age Pervert, is a more obvious example since he is largely drawing on a single source, Nietzsche. Certainly, his work is abhorrent, and I think it gets framed as a "misreading," because of this. There is a definite tendencies towards "No True Nietzschean," arguments when someone transvalues values the wrong way, towards the wrong politics. I couldn't make my way through more than a small amount of his stupid book, but nothing I saw screamed "misreading," to me, and apparently his advisors at Yale agreed.

I am not super familiar with Land, but what I've seen from him wouldn't place him outside the scope of post-modernism, but for the political slant.

Funny enough, the Anti-Defamation League has a whole article on "accelerationism," and claims the term, largely through Land, has lost all connection with its original use in leftist circles. This just seems like a hollow claim. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s pitch about "accelerating the process," by which capitalism undermines itself is still the core concept when the term is employed by neo-fascists, they just see a different sort of future as resulting from this.

Yes, I was familiar with the Sokal affair.

Pomo was never in high regard among the general population , so there was nothing to recover from. — Joshs

More that this, people seem to resent pomo without taking much trouble to understand it. The subject seems to bring out antipathies the way Communism used to. Notice how Jordan Peterson uses the term 'postmodern Marxists' to rally his troupes and disparage the current era of alleged meaninglessness.

I think it would be better to ask what postmodernism has to say about the sciences in general, not narrowing down to math. What does postmodernism say about logic? What does postmodernism say about philosophy? — ssu

It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science (which is tentative and subject to revision) or philosophy (which might be seen as a swirling chaos of theories and positions).

It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up.

There is a definite tendencies towards "No True Nietzschean," arguments when someone transvalues values the wrong way, towards the wrong politics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's an amusing line. :up:

↪Joshs
As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.
— Joshs

Yeah, what would mathematicians know about maths
— Banno — Joshs

Nice manipulation of context.

Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? — Joshs

In the case of scientific understanding, a spectrum from naive to well informed to me seems more relevant than a true false binary.

Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’? — Joshs

Along the same lines, declaring the earlier versions naive seems more descriptive of the situation than false.

It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up. — Tom Storm

Here's the context:

The notion of mathematics as objective and eternal is today being replaced, among mathematics educators, by the postmodernist notion of “social constructivism.” According to “social constructivism,” knowledge is subjective, not objective; rather than being found by careful investigation of an actually existing external world, it is “constructed” (i.e., created) by each individual, according to his unique needs and social setting. Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct. — Arthur T. White

There are no true sentences except when there are?

There's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back. — Austin

the Principia Mathematica (written in 1910) is commonly known to take about a thousand pages to in part formally prove that 1 and 1 is in fact equivalent to 2. — javra

Equals, not merely equivalent to.

Was it approximately 1000 pages or closer to about 360?

Also, the proof is mentioned near the end of the book, but that doesn't mean that that many pages are required to complete the proof, since there is a lot of other material between the axioms and that particular proof. It may be that it would take a lot less pages to simply get to the theorem from the axioms.

No such formal proof occurred previously in human history — javra

No proof had been given with constraints such those of PM, but the theorem is easy to prove in Peano's system that was a couple of decades prior to PM.

The subject seems to bring out antipathies the way Communism used to. Notice how Jordan Peterson uses the term 'postmodern Marxists' to rally his troupes and disparage the current era of alleged meaninglessness. — Tom Storm

What’s amusing about this is Peterson doesn’t realize that thinkers he mentions as card-carrying postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault offer ideas directly counter to marxist dialectics. Postmodernism arose in opposition to, not as an elaboration of Marxism.

It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science (which is tentative and subject to revision) or philosophy (which might be seen as a swirling chaos of theories and positions — Tom Storm

You’re right to see maths as a central concern of pomo thinkers. They recognize that the essence of modern science is the marriage of the pure mathematical idealizations invented by Greek and pre-Greek cultures and observation of the empirical world. The peculiar notion of exactitude which is the goal of scientific description has its origin in this pairing.

Yet, while everyone has always universally agreed that 1 + 1 = 2, the formal mathematical proof of the book by which this is established is not universally agreed upon without criticism. As one example of this, at least one of the axioms the book uses, its introduced axiom of reducibility, has a significant number of criticism—thereby not being universally apparent in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2 is but, instead, being a best reasoned supposition which was set down as axiomatic. — javra

Was the axiom of reducibility used in the proof?

Gödel, the originator of the incompleteness theorems, was guided by his self-declared mathematical Platonism — Joshs

If I recall correctly from my readings about this, Godel did not arrive at realism until long after he proved the incompleteness theorem. In any case, the proof of the incompleteness theorem does not depend on any particular philosophy.

What would philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz or Avicenna know about maths? — Joshs

Is that a rhetorical question meant to convey that Descartes and Leibniz knew little about mathematics? Or is it meant ironically to say that indeed they knew a lot about mathematics? In any case, of course it is famous that Descartes and Leibniz are among the most important mathematicians in history.

Thanks for the corrections.

Was it approximately 1000 pages or closer to about 360? — TonesInDeepFreeze

Bad online reference apparently. Yes it now seems to be the latter.

Was the axiom of reducibility used in the proof? — TonesInDeepFreeze

A best inference on my part, The axiom was indeed introduced in PM according to this reference. Haven't been able to verify if it was used to prove 1 + 1 = 2.

Let me know if you find these well received corrections make a change in what I uphold in that post: to paraphrase, that some more basic aspects of mathematics give all indications of being universal while other more developed maths do not.

Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)

Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career — Count Timothy von Icarus

One problem here is the impossibility of coming up with a one-size-fits-all definition of what it means to be left or right wing. So much depends on the issue. I have my own peculiar way of thinking about the conservative-liberal binary, which is easy to poke holes in, but at least it gives some basis for discussion. It resembles in some respects the attempts by Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff to provide a profile of a personality type which gravitates to one pole or another of this binary. But whereas their analysis was based on psychological disposition, I view this binary as a developmental spectrum paralleling the history of philosophical eras. For me conservatism is equivalent to traditionalism, and philosophical traditionalism, from the vantage of writers like Deleuze, supports hard categorical distinctions that lead to the placement of particular genders , ethnicities, races, within rigid, opposed boxes, and organized hierarchically. This is of course a gross simplification , but hopefully you get the idea. Deleuze’s approach, by contrast, abandons hierarchical , categorical thinking for endless differences upon differences both within and between, that blur and entangle the boundaries between distinctions that place individuals and groups either exclusively inside or outside.

Nick Land is an unusual personality, to say the least, so it may be impossible to place his thinking within any familiar political category, but to the extent that he embraces any significant features of Deleuze’s thinking, I would have to say that he doesnt see the world the way that traditionalists do, based on the way I have characterized philosophical conservatism.

. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.

Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true if left and right stand for nothing besides mindless reactions against whatever the other side does.
But if you entertain my view of the binary as correlated with stages of a historical intellectual development, it matters what one is challenging the foundations of power and dogma in favor of. If Land subverts the establishment’s norms because he truly believes in rigid boundaries of gender, racial, class or whatever, and their strict hierarchization , then this places him by my reckoning on the philosophical right. If , on the other hand, his aim is to anarchically tear down all extant hierarchies and stratifications , with no desire to replace them with new ones,( I’m reminded of Zizek endorsing Trump in order to blow up the whole political order in preparation for his Marxist utopia), then I’d place him on the philosophical left regardless of how violent and disruptive the results.

Here's the context — Banno

Thanks, interesting article.

I didn't find in that, or in any posts in this thread, anything mathematically interesting PM critique of mathematics. I suppose the reason is that there's none.

If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here).

some more basic aspects of mathematics given all indications of being universal while other more developed maths do not. — javra

I don't opine on those. Though, of course, certain concepts that are basic to certain areas of mathematics are not even universally known, let alone universally accepted. But, coincidentally, in another thread someone else mentioned stick counting. I don't necessarily say that it is universal, but I do think that if anything is objective, then finitistic reasoning, whether abstract or concretized by algorithmic manipulation of discrete tokens, is objective. Yet, objectivity and universality are not necessarily the same.

In any case, the proof of the incompleteness theorem does not depend on any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t this depend on how one interprets the significance of performing a mathematical proof? Are you familiar with what Wittgenstein had to say about what it is we are doing when we construct a mathematical proof?

that a rhetorical question meant to convey that Descartes and Leibnitz knew little about mathematics? Or is it meant ironically to say that indeed they knew a lot about mathematics? In any case, of course it is famous that Descartes and Leibnitz are among the most important mathematicians in history. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Indeed they are. I was suggesting that even though pomo philosophers have not contributed specifically mathematical innovations, the best of them have as deep an understanding of the underpinnings of math as did Descartes and Leibnitz.

How one regards the significance of formal proof and formal theories may be philosophical, but the incompleteness proof itself about formal theories does not require any particular philosophy.

Got it. Thanks.

I say that without prejudice to the question of whether the mentioned postmodernist philosophers do or do not understand mathematics as well as Descartes and Leibnitz did (even recognizing that Leibnitz's calculus needed to be rectified by late 19th century concepts and then 20th century axiomatizations (which also include non-standard analysis that does formalize infinitesimals)).

But do you think those postmodernist philosophers understand 20th century foundational mathematics as well as mathematicians and certain others in the philosophy of mathematics do?

If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here — Olento

I think you’ll find that the most interesting pomo analyses of mathematics are neither strictly about power or politics, although these are never absent . Rather, they reveal the historical and philosophical origins and significance of the concepts of objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness that is peculiar to mathematical logic. That is to say, they don’t deny that mathematics contributes these qualities, what they are interested in showing is that such qualities are secondaryto and derived from more primordial and fundamental ways of thinking that are precise in a different but more powerful way.

How one regards the significance of formal proof and formal theories may be philosophical, but the incompleteness proof itself about formal theories does not require any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t it require interpretation? It may seem as though it is in the nature of proof that it be absolutely transparent to anyone who understands mathematical proof, but hasn’t there been a lot written over the past 70 years or so (I believe Ian Hacking had some interesting things to say about proof) ‘relativizing’ its very nature?

Doesn’t it require interpretation? — Joshs

One may discuss its philosophical implications, but the proof itself doesn't require a philosophical interpretation.

I am not familiar with the notion of 'relativizing its very nature', so I can't opine on it.

pomo — Joshs

Any one else read that as "porno"? May just be the font, or my glasses....

...what they are interested in showing is that such qualities are secondary to and derived from more primordial and fundamental ways of thinking that are precise in a different but more powerful way. — Joshs

Can you explain this further? What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why?

It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up.
— Tom Storm

Here's the context:
The notion of mathematics as objective and eternal is today being replaced, among mathematics educators, by the postmodernist notion of “social constructivism.” According to “social constructivism,” knowledge is subjective, not objective; rather than being found by careful investigation of an actually existing external world, it is “constructed” (i.e., created) by each individual, according to his unique needs and social setting. Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct.
— Arthur T. White — Banno

I did read have a cursory read of Izmirli's piece which you provided. Aside from the historical survey I wasn't quite sure what the piece was saying. I was just pointing out that people's take on postmodernism varies. In this case, White versus @joshs. It seems to me that joshs was making the point that White has it wrong.

Can you explain this further? What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why? — Banno

Yes, I'm interested in this too.

It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science - It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up. — Tom Storm

Exactly, do not make the mistake that people engaged with the "culture war" make here.

As I was saying, the objectives of social sciences when approaching math is different from math. Postmodernism is similar: if it's focus is how the past modernist agenda is over and how it's about "an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power", it's nonsense then to talk about 2 + 2 = 5, because any postmodernist that is against 'naive realism' isn't trying to debunk arithmetic with natural numbers. He or she may be interested in what questions we want to use arithmetic and where not, especially when it comes to applications and modelling the real world. Just look at the role we give the indicator GDP or GDP per capita. Yes, calculating the GDP you do use math, mainly arithmetic actually, but obviously the calculation has a lot of implications to political and economic power. And counting the GDP is really in the field of economics and other social sciences.

This kind of answer (that pomo makes 2+2=5 OK) is simply from someone who doesn't know and doesn't care to know what the pomo/sociel science gobbledygook is about. It's just nonsense, period. Hence it's a danger! And that seems to be what for example mr White above is saying that you quoted.

And of course there is postmodernist nonsense. The laxness of rigor was shown very well by Alan Sokal and he does have a genuine reason for being critical where "leftist" academics is going. Yet I can assure that similar nonsense can be find also in the 'hard sciences': it's just usually hidden in such complicated math and jargon, that nobody can clearly understand what kind of nonsense it is. If you would put the end conclusions in plain English, which is totally forbidden, then only the layman would notice the crap the 'academic' study is. Especially the use of math is a culprit here as if you don't understand the math, you don't understand what the whole thing is about.

A previous similar attitude between the 'hard' (true) sciences and social sciences was by C.P. Snow and his book two cultures from 1959. There Snow paints this picture of one scientific culture, the hard sciences, still upholding the true foundations of science and then there being this soft underbelly, the social sciences and those academics who study them and their utter ignorance of nearly everything.

Now some might argue that Snow only attacked the ignorance of social science people about science (and thus the issue simply would be that academic people have too narrow and specific areas of study), but that's actually not the case. Snow's hubris and arrogance can be seen actually from the end of the book. There he purposes that since the "other culture" has so badly lost itself, the 'true' science ought to tackle the most difficult problems of the current era, namely the Cold War and nuclear weapons armament! Well, science didn't solve the Cold War, MAD kept the politicians from not starting the war and economic realities made the Soviet Union to collapse. Something that C.P. Snow was clueless about among others.

Yet many even now purpose that since postmodernism (or whatever leftism it supposed to be) has so badly crippled the social sciences, then natural science should take their role too!

it's nonsense then to talk about 2 + 2 = 5, because any postmodernist that is against 'naive realism' isn't trying to debunk arithmetic with natural numbers — ssu

Maybe those people are not real post-modernists, but they do exist:

addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” — WSJ

We all remember the 2+2=5 nonsense of 2021-2022 (that a prized mathematician even went to Twitter to defend), whatever label we apply to the people that pushed it. It was brought up in this thread exactly because it is a deconstructing of mathematics as culturally relative.