Talk:Postmodernism

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The article does not name a single "postmodernist" thinker who has ever claimed that "Reality is a social construct." The article does not name such a writer because none exist. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Van Pelt (talk)

Many people, however, do say truth is social construct. The article can be reworded for that. It is probably better said that the Existentialist or Nihilist would say that reality is a social construct. --Ymmotrojam 10:58, 23 March 2007 (EDT)

The postmodernist position is emphatically not “truth is a social construct” many people misunderstand postmodernism to make that claim, but no postmodernist philosopher has ever made that claim, or any claim that could reasonably be understood to imply it. What some postmodernists do say is that because we (humans) experience reality through the lens of a social construct (language) we are incapable reaching/describing/understanding truth—not that truth is a social construct, but that truth is inaccessible because we experience the world through the lens of our language which is a social construct.

The Existentialist position, also, is not that truth is a social construct—it is (roughly) that value/meaning must be provided by the person doing the valuing or looking for meaning. The Existentialist may (but need not) deny that there is value that is not socially constructed—but value is not synonymous with truth and many of the truths in the world are not truths about value.

The Nihilist also does not make this claim. The Nihilist says there is no value in the world, this is, in itself, a truth claim—the Nihilist actually makes a claim about truth, separate from social construction. --Reginod 14:10, 24 March 2007 (EDT)

The explanation above is absolutely wrong. No postmodernist has ever proposed that language keeps us from truth, as if language is some sort of screen that stands between ourselves and a determined Truth beyond language. That model, in fact, is precisely the one that poststructuralism (to use a more precise, if less comprehensive term) has dismantled.

Poststructuralists don't deny that there is truth as opposed to falsehood. The only thing they critique is the definition of Truth as something that exists as a determined iteration. There is a certain rhetoric that arises -- especially in relation to history and historiography -- where this mistake arises. For instance: Most historians, like poststructuralists, agree that the reality of the past is a kind of material continuum that we, as speakers of language, divide up into conceptual units like "events"; and we take portions of that continuum and create discrete entities out of it by assigning those portions Names. This is how history becomes intelligible to us: a historiographer creates a narrative out of Names and Events (the latter, strictly speaking, function as names as well: the Name of the Event).

Now, how do historians come to an agreement (more or less) about the Names and Events that will constitute a particular historical narrative? Broadly speaking, they come to a consensus based on the greatest agreement of Names and Events as articulated in witness testimonials, other documents, and other forms of evidence (e.g., archaeological).

A crucial point to remember is that Names and Events are wholly distinct from everything else that goes into history-writing: most significantly, interpretations as to motives of individuals, and interpretations as to causal relationships among events. Even the most conservative historian will tell you that these elements can only be the result of interpretation -- hopefully a judicious interpretation, but interpretation nonetheless.

No historian ever claims that there exists "out there" somewhere a "true" historiography where all of these Facts (Names and Events) and interpretations are already iterated -- i.e., where they are iterated, but no human has created that iteration. No historian believes that this kind of determined and iterated Truth exists.

But then, sometimes, confusion arises: it arises when the concept of "fiction" enters the scene. When Edmund Morris wrote a biography of Ronald Reagan that included obviously fictional episodes along with the normal facts and interpretations that a biography engages in, the New York Times Book Review asks, "But where's the Truth of him [Reagan]?" When the concept of fiction comes into the discourse, many historians make the mistake of forgetting the simple fact that historiography is created by a consensus about Names and Events, and interpretations about everything else: History, when contrasted with Fiction, is suddenly conceived as unadulterated "Truth". Fiction becomes a scapegoat, the single name for everything that keeps historical truth from view; it becomes a veil before history, and truth is now simply a matter of unveiling. When the category of fiction is then cast out, bearing all sins of falsehood and indeterminacy, the historiography that remains behind in the settling dust seems to emerge as unobscured truth. A rhetoric of history as revelation replaces history as production.

This kind of analysis is what poststructuralism does: It does not question the existence of truth, as long as we understand truth in the precise historicist definition of consensus-grounded Facts (names and events). Poststructuralism only critiques certain false rhetorics of Truth, as in the example above.

But this critique of certain rhetorics of truth is actually only a tiny epiphenomelal effect of what real poststructuralists do. If you really want to have an article that purports to talk about what famous "postmodernists" like Derrida and Foucault actually talk about, it would have to at least include the following:

The seminal tome of deconstruction is Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. One of its major theses has to do with how writing and speech have been conceptualized in the Western philosophical tradition up to the present day. With detailed readings of Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, and many others, the book demonstrates that writing has always been conceived as something “secondary” to speech: writing is thought of as a kind of transcription of speech, whereas speech is thought of as a direct representation of consciousness. In other words, philosophers and linguists have assumed that speech is “closer” to one's “present consciousness” than writing. Hence the metaphors “living speech” versus “dead books”.

In reality, of course, speech and writing have the exact same relationship to any originating “consciousness”; although the one is composed of sound and the other ink, they both have the exact same status as physical signifiers, and neither one comes into being with any greater or lesser “distance” from consciousness, intention, etc. Derrida goes on in historical detail to explain why our philosophical tradition has maintained the faulty “metaphysics of presence,” as he puts it, within a whole array of conceptual oppositions, not just speech vs. writing.

Another example of what people call “postmodern” thought -- a hazy term that most of these philosophers do not, in fact, subscribe to, despite the insistence of journalists and other half-informed observers -- is in Michel Foucault's study of The History of Sexuality. In its archival research among various discourses in the human sciences, the book demonstrates that it wasn't until the 19th century that “sexuality” became so conceptually elevated it began to determine attributes of human “identity”. Earlier, if it had been discovered that a man, say, had had sexual encounters with other men, it would not be presumed-as it would later-that we have thereby discovered the essential, pre-existing “homosexuality” of his being. (Ever wonder why our sex acts are supposed to reveal a more fundamental “truth” about ourselves than, say, our exercise or dietary habits?) The book is essentially a history of the process by which we came to assign ourselves an ever more detailed array of sexual attributes -- and, in fact, Foucault's work as a whole is a history of the explosive “incitement to discourse” that hit new heights in the nineteenth century; a history of how and why we came to make ourselves knowable and “registerable” to certain disciplinary and institutional powers by articulating ourselves with unprecedentedly detailed units of intelligibility.

Clearly, these subjects have exactly nothing to do with any of the ideas attributed to "postmodernism" in this article.

I disagree with your analysis -- my recollection of Heidegger’s Being and Time was that our language traps/tricks us into making assumptions about the nature of being, that the truth of being was never inquired into as we, as language users, already thought we knew what it was. I would say that fits with my what I’ve said – but I spent my most recent years stuck in a department which focused far more heavily on the Analytic philosophers than on Continental philosophers, so it is entirely possible that my recollection of their points is mistaken.

Nonetheless, it is clear that we are in agreement that, whatever the postmodernists did say, what they did not say was truth is a social construct.--Reginod 13:48, 25 March 2007 (EDT)

Your description of Heidegger sounds fine, but let's not confuse the issue: you agree he's an existentialist, roughly speaking, not a "postmodernist," right? (I'm not sure why we're talking about existentialism in this entry...)

I’d call Heidegger a forerunner of postmodernism (with some existentialist leanings—but more postmodernist than existentialist if I had to put him in one category or the other), but we were talking existentialism because a previous commentator suggested that “reality is a social construct” was a claim that either existentialists or nihilists would make (and I’m not sure why those two got put together, but I wanted to make sure we didn’t wander down that odd path).--Reginod 13:20, 26 March 2007 (EDT)