[HN Gopher] Deconstructing Jackie
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Deconstructing Jackie
Author : pseudolus
Score : 25 points
Date : 2021-03-20 10:57 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| ralusek wrote:
| Postmodernism turns structures into soup. Some corrupted
| structures need to be deconstructed into soup, and skepticism,
| cynicism, and criticism are good tools for the job.
|
| However, you can't build with soup. And postmodernists are
| typically horrible builders. And overzealous postmodernists have
| an underdeveloped sense of when to stop deconstructing. And they
| seem to be unaware that most structures that come from the soup
| are unimaginably worse than the one that they just tore down.
|
| If a cynical skeptic shows up to fix society with a scalpel,
| that's a healthy dose of postmodernism; an adult. If a skeptic
| shows up with an atom bomb, you're dealing with a child. There is
| no better phrase with which to characterize the current wave of
| postmodernism than perpetually "throwing the baby out with the
| bathwater."
| TeeMassive wrote:
| I'm rather surprised by the number of critical theory related
| articles on HN recently. Maybe it is because hackers are
| literally people who like to disassemble things to better
| understand them? Although I'm more cynical and I think it's
| more likely a bunch of people in political forums coordinating
| to implant those articles (this is what happened to Reddit
| after all).
|
| On YouTube there was this video about how Music Theory is White
| Supremacy. Yes you read that right, Critical Music Theory. Of
| course the points made do not really stand to simple scrutiny
| and doesn't even direct proof of what they claim outside of
| "it's not the best system and those who are propagating it tend
| to be White". There's even reference to math not being
| universal, and I got into a debate where I had to make the
| point that 2+2 is not equal to 5, which kinda tells you the
| intellectual honesty of those espousing this kind of thinking.
|
| CR is great at deconstruction, but the problem as you pointed
| out they entirely fail at making anything that makes sense or
| is useful. They openly state that it is better to make points
| that "have the right political impact" rather than being
| correct (actually a quote from Vaush) under the pretext that
| since there are no objective truth and that only "those in
| power" make the point, it's just better to pick models that
| destroys structures of power.
| bitdizzy wrote:
| I dont know which video you watched but it's basically true
| that what most people call Music Theory focuses much of its
| attention on a narrow period of music on a narrow continent
| within narrow analytical frameworks (Schenkerian, for
| example) and comes associated with a lot of normative baggage
| about what is valuable and interesting in music and what is
| not which is biased towards specific musical traditions
| which, surprise, are white.
|
| Schenker himself admitted to white supremacist values in the
| development of his ideas. Of course it was en vogue at the
| time.
|
| The music under study isn't white supremacist itself of
| course, nor is the structural analysis. Whiteness is usually
| imputed post hoc by less talented hangers-on.
| ralusek wrote:
| Yes, critical theories are philosophies often meant to be
| executed on behalf of "ends by whatever means."
|
| They're antithetical to liberalism. Liberalism has no ends,
| it's effectively JUST a description of means. If anything,
| the means are themselves the ends.
|
| Liberalism is content with asserting something like "freedom
| of speech is a fundamental mechanism for a functioning
| society." Critical theory instead asserts that those with
| power have demonstrated the capability to amplify certain
| speech and marginalize other speech. Because their goal is to
| maximize the power of those they assert to be marginalized,
| rather than having a principled position on speech, they'll
| instead leverage whatever tools at their disposal in order to
| do exactly what they condemned: amplify certain speech and
| marginalize other speech. This is the reason it's a common
| statement among these people to say "never attack tactics,
| only attack motives." The means are completely sidelined.
|
| Compare this to what I would consider to be a proper
| deconstruction of liberalism. Rather than saying "I have
| encountered a pattern where freedom of speech is not extended
| to all groups equally, therefore freedom of speech is an
| invalid ideal, and can only ever be used to uphold corrupted
| hierarchies," one could instead say "I consider any failure
| of freedom of speech to be an _implementation_ failure in
| need of examination and correction, rather than getting rid
| of the principle due to incidental failure to produce the
| outcomes I desire."
|
| The whole pattern employed by modern critical theory seems to
| work backwards from "these systems have failed to produce the
| outcomes I desire, and these outcomes should be evidence that
| the whole system is corrupted." They're basically horrible
| scientists.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > Liberalism has no ends, it's effectively JUST a
| description of means. If anything, the means are themselves
| the ends.
|
| Liberalism has terminal values, wouldn't those qualify as
| ends?
| ducharmdev wrote:
| I think this is why I enjoyed Deleuze & Guattari a lot; IMO
| they seemed to be more aware of the futility of the "burn
| everything to the ground" approach and overall, their
| conclusions feel more additive than subtractive.
| analog31 wrote:
| An old saying: "It takes a carpenter to build a shed, but a
| jackass can knock it down."
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Chomsky had a saying about postmodernism in general: most of
| their ideas are either absurd or trivial. For example, take
| moral relativism: it's either a trivial observation - that
| different cultures have different notions of exactly what is
| moral or not; or it is an absurd idea, that morality means
| nothing and you are as justified to pick a flower as you are to
| rip another human's arms.
| kar5pt wrote:
| Chomsky has demonstrated little understanding of
| "postmodernism" (whatever that vague term entails). I would
| take any criticism he has of French poststructuralist
| thinkers with a grain of salt.
|
| For example I don't think any of the philosophers usually
| called "postmodernists" have actually argued for the type of
| moral relativism you're describing. Foucault didn't, Lacan
| didn't, Delueze didn't. I don't know if Derrida did, but I'm
| pretty sure Chomsky doesn't either.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > For example I don't think any of the philosophers usually
| called "postmodernists" have actually argued for the type
| of moral relativism you're describing
|
| They openly reject the notion of aiming towards objective
| truth and replace it with building ideas that are better at
| changing power structures. There's a good reason why people
| are even considering 2+2=5 as an actual hypothesis.
|
| Even if they didn't espouse those radical views themselves,
| it's not hard to see that they laid the framework for it.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Chomsky _has_ a saying, unless he 's dead, which he is not,
| or has for some reason denounced some saying.
|
| Your comment gave me doubt, I had to double check.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Ooops, sorry to introduce that doubt. I had seen this as
| something he had said a long time ago, but you're right
| that I should have used another tense.
| vixen99 wrote:
| "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth
| is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So
| don't."
|
| Roger Scruton:
| [deleted]
| imbnwa wrote:
| As far as influence on contemporary progressivist ideologies,
| Derrida's impact is rather minimal, likely owing to how difficult
| reading him is. The historian Michel Foucault is orders of
| magnitude more influential on American humanities departments and
| modern progressivist ideologies.
|
| Most of the major American writers in the 80s, 90s, 00s, like
| Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, et al, are big readers of Foucault
| and the intense use of the word "normalize" you see amongst Left-
| leaning youth nowadays bears a direct lineage from Foucault as a
| technical term in his work.
|
| Of course, the relationship of an author to his readers is never
| fidelitous, likely owning to physics, so reading Foucault, then
| his readers, then modern popular ideologies will always bear
| striking differences.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Fun fact: My first time reading Derrida or Guattari was in a US
| philo book club. In english. I'm French. I read the books in my
| mothers tongue of course. But it was really interesting to see
| how the pedantic translation gets in the way. I'm not the only
| one the 'teacher' of that group speaks decent french and was
| using me a lot to 'demistify' some fancy translation.
|
| "Does the sentence sound contrived in french? because it's hard
| to follow in English"
|
| It's interesting, I have only the minimal French background in
| philosophie, it's mandatory to take 2 years in high-school. But
| I was less lost than some US folks with more comprensive
| training in that field.
|
| ( I did read some Guattari in high school, but nothing
| comprenhensive )
| ducharmdev wrote:
| I would be very curious about your perspective myself if I
| were in that book club! It's interesting that you say the
| translation got in the way of understanding the text; I can
| see how the literary quality of this type of philosophy would
| not do well with one-to-one translations.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/xeZ6o
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210320182025/https://www.newst...
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I had a lot of fun with the postmodernist thinkers in college,
| and they expanded my brain in the same way that Haskell did.
| Unfortunately, I found that much like Haskell (forgive me,
| Haskell, for the uncharitable analogy), I did not find much use
| for it after college.
|
| As another comment alludes to here, I found the tools I learned
| about through the postmodernists most useful for taking things
| apart -- with some exceptions (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Guattari).
| However, when it came to putting them back together again and
| doing something useful, I often felt I was somewhat on my own.
|
| Perhaps others have gone through the same realization. There are
| a couple of thinkers on the math/philosophy side (Godel, Peirce,
| Wittgenstein, Cantor, Church), the cultural theory side (McLuhan,
| Paglia, Lasch), the literary fiction side (Gibson, Borges,
| Calvino, Tsutsui), the experimental composer side (Webern) and
| the pop music side (Prince, Martin, Jackson, etc) that I've been
| able to draw creative inspiration from. But by and large, it's
| been individuals, not really movements. Maybe that's just how it
| is with any movement?
| mycologos wrote:
| > Prince, Martin, Jackson, etc
|
| Assuming Prince is "the" Prince and Jackson is Michael Jackson,
| if I understand your comment correctly, you're describing them
| as "postmodern thinkers". If so, why? Or maybe you're just
| describing inspirational individuals in general?
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Sorry, I think the way I phrased it was ambiguous. I was
| phrasing them in contrast to literal "postmodern thinkers" in
| that they're pop culture creators who achieved significant
| impact in the postmodern cultural millieu. It's true that you
| could consider them "postmodern thinkers" but I don't know
| how much I'd agree with that. For me, it's more they fill in
| the gaps of what I was looking for (perhaps for guidance,
| perhaps for inspiration, perhaps just for a role model) when
| I read the postmodern thinkers, searching for tools I could
| use to reconstruct -- not just deconstruct.
|
| Let me add in another thinker here who in a very literal
| sense fills in the gaps between the two groups -- Terre
| Thaemlitz [1], who is both a postmodern thinker and a DJ. I
| suppose one could also cite early Nick Land [2], given his
| seminal importance in the establishment of the CCRU at
| University of Warwick, which straddled the divide of
| postmodernism and rave culture. Unfortunately, Nick Land does
| end up moving into less savory territory [3] more recently; I
| view that era more as a cautionary tale than anything.
|
| [1] http://www.comatonse.com/writings/becoming-minor.html
|
| [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10838202-fanged-
| noumena
|
| [3] https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-
| introdu...
| ducharmdev wrote:
| I was always conflicted about poststructural thinkers; on the one
| hand I was enamored with the creativity of their ideas and
| analyses, but on the other hand it seemed that their insights
| were always communicated in the most impenetrable writing. I get
| that their chosen modes of communication are often interwined
| with the ideas themselves, but nonetheless it reminds me of
| engineers that create overly complex solutions to flex how clever
| they are.
|
| Although I always had more fun with the continental philosophers
| than analytic ones, I do appreciate certain thinkers that can
| bring clarity to the works of Derrida, Foucault, etc. For
| example, I've always had an interest in Deleuze & Guattari, but
| it sure is helpful to have someone like Manuel DeLanda when
| reading works like A Thousand Plateaus. If not for him, I doubt I
| would've made sense of the original text at all.
| [deleted]
| robocat wrote:
| I love this article "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My
| Postmodern Adventure" written by a software engineer:
| https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
|
| Edit: it is the best explanation for "it seemed that their
| insights were always communicated in the most impenetrable
| writing" I have seen.
| finikytou wrote:
| In France, no one reads Derrida. No one ever did. He never really
| mattered. People never really considered him as an important
| philosopher neither a second tier one. It always amazed me that
| americans embraced him. I tried a few times reading him it is
| just an horrible vain experience full of really vain writing. He
| was probably the closest to what is modern american philosophy:
| marketing. no depth and all in appearances.
|
| funny that now his thoughts -that contributed to all the skin-
| color related communitarianism and destructuration that is
| pushing american middle/lower class into race-centric battles
| (while educating everyone at the same time that race doesn't
| exist) instead of focusing on class issues (occupy wall street)-
| are coming back to france imported from all the american minds
| and social movements.
|
| Just like USA thought they won the cold war going to space while
| the communists entered their schools and educated their kids we
| see similar things in france with us fighting the ideas of
| derrida decades ago not to enter into society just to see them
| coming back x10 from the american empire through netflix,twitter,
| facebook and even hacker news of today. and obviously the vicious
| thing of this americanized destructuring system is that they
| developed tools to annihilate any alternative thoughts
| (Censorship on twitter/fb, downvote on HN/Shaming individuals at
| work or even remove them from their job for daring to think by
| themselves) deeming them racist,supremacist or whatever is it.
| even if it comes from minorities - like me- then they will call
| us uncle tom or "race traitor" because we try to debate instead
| of siding with the people who think they are right and that
| destructuring should happen
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I had to read Guattari in french high school. It's in the
| syllabus along with Foucault.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic battle on top
| of ideological battle. We don't want either of those things
| here, and the two together are toxic.
|
| What we want is curious conversation. It's certainly possible
| to have that on these topics, low-probability though that may
| be on the internet. Actually the OP is a nice basis for curious
| conversation--thoughtful, open-minded, interesting, and easy to
| read. (Though the Althusser bit seems gratuitous.) It's
| noteworthy for considering Derrida without either subscribing
| to or denouncing him. That's unusual, and very much in the
| spirit of curiosity. As long as we're talking about this, we
| should follow that example.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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