User:EditsByDave/sandbox

Update 11/16 - "Criticism of Postmodernism" edit
Will complete more fully in the next couple days but finalizing the edits I have done, now.

Added the new lead.

I'm still unsure how I think the headings of this page should be reorganized (though I think they really ought to be) so I'm going to put my research about "Dispute About Meaning of Postmodernism" as the new lead under the "Vagueness" section. I think this works basically just as well.

Update 11/8
Returning to Wikipedia in an effort to get caught up, make final amendments to my contribution, and get the most I can from this project.

I've tried repeatedly to work out a way this page could be reorganized, to better help readers take note of the different forms of criticism which are directed toward "postmodernism". Most of the work I've done thus far has been editing and restructuring of the existing content on the page. I have written a totally new lead section. The current one is needlessly redundant, obscure, and biased - it heavily describes criticism of the "postmodern humanities" and its vagueness and relativism, without any mention of criticisms about the conditions of postmodernity itself. It is vital this is corrected, especially since many authors influenced by postmodernism were themselves critical of it. Both the lead paragraph and the header organization should be adjusted, accordingly. The lead now clearly informs readers what postmodernism is and the modernist concepts it criticizes.

I have also introduced a new header, "Dispute About Meaning of Postmodern" (which I don't love the name of, but needed to settle on) because I think it is absolutely necessary for an encyclopedic entry, such as this. As it stands, over half of the article is about how the term "postmodernism" is supposedly flimsy to the point of being nonsensical. This should be introduced, through scholarship about postmodernism, not polemic comments from public academics (which is basically all the page is, now). I think potentially more of the content of the page could eventually make it into this section (since much of the criticism of postmodern scholarship - although not all of it - is about its obscurity) but for now I am only including the three paragraphs I wrote, within it.

Last, I want to partition the rest of the page into three sections: Criticism of Postmodern Scholarship, Criticism of Postmodernity, and Criticism of Postmodern Art. All three types of criticisms are mentioned in the page, but all are confusingly homogenized together. This should be fixed.

In the new page "Criticism of Postmodernity" I want to add one final contribution, which brings in some useful substance from the separate "Postmodernity" article, as well as adds a few additional citations of my own.

New Intro for "Criticism of Postmodernism" article
Criticism of postmodernism is intellectually diverse, reflecting various critical attitudes toward postmodernity, postmodern philosophy, postmodern art, and postmodern architecture. Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, especially those associated with Enlightenment rationality. Thus, while common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress, critics of postmodernism often defend such concepts. It is frequently alleged that postmodern scholars promote obscurantism, are hostile to objective truth, and encourage relativism (in culture, morality, knowledge) to an extent that is epistemically and ethically crippling.

Dispute About Meaning of Postmodernism
Postmodernism has received significant criticism for its lack of stable definition and meaning. The term marks a departure from modernism, and may refer to an epoch of human history (see Postmodernity), a set of movements, styles, and methods in art and architecture, or a broad range of scholarship, drawing influence from scholarly fields such as critical theory, post-structuralist philosophy, and deconstructionism. There is substantial dispute about which features of postmodernism, if any, are essential to the concept, and its enigmatic meaning and related "perceived lack of political commitment, subjectivist interpretations, fragmentary nature, and nihilistic tendencies" have led to substantial academic frustration and criticism. The ineffability of postmodernism has been described as "a truism" and some claim it is a "buzzword". This "semantic instability" has been long acknowledged in scholarship.

Critics of postmodernism frequently charge that postmodern art/authorship is vague, obscurantist, or meaningless. Some philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, argue that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, since its critique would be impossible without the concepts and methods that modern reason provides.

Postmodern-friendly intellectuals, such as British historian Perry Anderson defend the existence of the varied meanings assigned to "postmodernism", arguing that they only contradict one another on the surface, and that a postmodernist analysis can offer insight into contemporary culture. Kaya Yilmaz defends the lack of clarity and consistency in the term's definition, maintaining that because postmodernism is itself "anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist" it is fitting that the term cannot have any essential or fundamental meaning.

Criticism of Postmodern Scholarship
Linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond like people in other fields when asked: "Seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames." Christopher Hitchens in his book Why Orwell Matters advocates for simple, clear, and direct expression of ideas and argues that postmodernists wear people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. Hitchens also criticized a postmodernist volume, "The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism": "The French, as it happens, once evolved an expression for this sort of prose: la langue de bois, the wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and the dishonest can be offered. (This book) is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities."

In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins writes in a favorable review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures: "Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content."Dawkins then uses the following quotation from Félix Guattari as an example of this "lack of content" and of clarity."We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously."It has been suggested that the term "postmodernism" is a mere buzzword that means nothing. For example, Dick Hebdige, in Hiding in the Light, writes:

When it becomes possible for a people to describe as 'postmodern' the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a 'scratch' video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the 'intertextual' relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the 'metaphysics of presence', a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the 'predicament' of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the 'de-centring' of the subject, an 'incredulity towards metanarratives', the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the 'implosion of meaning', the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a 'media', 'consumer' or 'multinational' phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of 'placelessness' or the abandonment of placelessness ('critical regionalism') or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all these things as 'Postmodern' (or more simply using a current abbreviation as 'post' or 'very post') then it's clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.

Criticism of Postmodernity
still working on this part

Criticism of Postmodern Art
Art Bollocks is an article written by Brian Ashbee which appeared in the magazine Art Review in April 1999. Ashbee refers to the importance given to language in "post-modern" art. The post-modern art forms mentioned by Ashbee are: "installation art, photography, conceptual art [and] video". The term bollocks in the title relates to nonsense.

An example can be found in Private Eye issue 1482, being an imaginary interview of Tracey Emin by an unduly fawning Alan Yentob.

Plans for Talk Page Additions - needs redoing
Fellow Wikipedians,

Reviewing this article, I see multiple organizational issues that make it difficult to navigate, that I would like to help address.

Others on this talk page have rightly pointed out some of the article's existing problems: its shortage of citations; its lack of differentiation between criticism of postmodern *theory*, postmodernity as a historical era, and postmodern influence on art/architecture; its lack of discussion about responses to critiques of postmodernism; and its general absence of coherent structure.

In concurrence with these, I have some specific changes I believe would help improve the article, and that I wish to help bring about. I would love to hear feedback from anyone who feels these could be improved, or feels differently entirely about the article's direction. I submit that:

a) This page should clearly distinguish the following: critique of postmodernism conceptually (whether the term is itself meaningful), critique of postmodern scholarship (general accusations against the intellectual movement, as well as criticism of particular postmodern thinkers), critique of postmodernity as a historical era (usually, it is contended, linked to sociocultural, economic, or technological developments), and critique of postmodern art/architecture.

Of course, some critics of postmodernism involve multiple of these elements in their critique, and such should be acknowledged when appropriate in the article. However, I think these broad categories of "Criticism of Postmodernism" would be organizationally useful as this page is developed, going forward.

b) This page needs a wholly new structure of its headings, as they are not mutually exclusive, and because most are unclear and make the page incredibly difficult for the reader to navigate. Here are my thoughts for an initial re-structuring:


 * I suggest each of the four categories of "Criticism of Postmodernism" I described in point (a) above, be given distinct sections.
 * The article ought to have an introductory section regarding the term's meaning (perhaps "Dispute about Meaning") because there are numerous understandings of what postmodernism is, as described in the main "Postmodernism" wiki article, and because the diversity of these meanings is all too relevant to criticisms against it. Moreover, one criticism levied against Postmodernism (as is already cited within the article) is that the term itself is meaningless. This ought to be acknowledged, early in the article, rather than at the bottom of the "Vagueness" section header, where it is homogenized with other arguments about the obscurity of particular postmodern authors. Readers should know upfront that there is dispute about the veracity of postmodern, as a concept in of itself.
 * This would include the already-existing passages citing Dick Hebdige, Perry Anderson, Kaya Yilmaz, and Sokal.
 * The article ought to have a distinct section header about criticism of Postmodern art/architecture (perhaps separate sections for each of the two). Obviously, there is ample criticism of these aspects of Postmodernism, and they are distinguishable from Postmodern theory, but the reader is given no indication of this, looking at the outline of this article.
 * The current section "Art Bollocks" is a reference to a specific article about Postmodern Art, which hardly makes sense placed just below the sections "Moral Relativism" and "Marxian Criticisms" (in terms of importance and scope) since these are much broader categories of Postmodern Criticism. Instead, "Art Bollocks" and all other scholarship about Criticism of Postmodern Art should be placed under that general category.
 * The article also needs a section addressing Criticism of Postmodern Scholarship.
 * This would include the stylistic and epistemic criticisms mentioned in the Vagueness and Moral Relativism sections, alongside part of the Marxian Criticisms (those which critique Postmodern scholars), and the criticisms behind the "Sokal affair" and "Mumbo jumbo" sections (which I really doubt deserve their own respective sections, being fairly trivial references).
 * This section would also include criticism of particular postmodern thinkers, although very little of that is currently present in the article. There ought to be more work toward at least describing basic criticisms of popular "postmodern authors": Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.
 * The article should have a distinct section for Criticism of Postmodernism understood as "a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era" because of the broad scholarship which criticizes postmodernism in this way (Baudrillard, Jameson, Harvey, etc.). Having this section distinguished from Criticism of Postmodern Scholarship will more clearly illustrate to readers the differing sorts of postmodern criticism which exist, and the different understandings of "Postmodernism" which accompany them.
 * This would incorporate most of the existing text in the section "Marxian criticisms" as most criticisms of postmodernism which draw influence from Marx, are critical of the economic structure which helped bring about postmodern conditions.

c) Finally, I believe this page deserves a new introduction, which is less loosely organized, contains fewer redundancies, and more specifically foreshadows the different sorts of criticisms of postmodernism.



This page ought to note the overlap between those authors that criticize postmodernism, and those who have themselves introduced postmodern theory.

References

Get more sources! Must diversify. Donovan, Claire. (2013). Beyond the 'Postmodern University'. The European Legacy, Volume 18 (1), 24-21. 10.1080/10848770.2013.748119

Featherstone, Mark. (2018). From the Postmodern to the Ecological. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Volume 50 (14), 1514-1515. 10.1080/00131857.2018.1462508

Fleay, Jesse. (2018). Moral Realism Versus Moral Relativism in the Postmodern Myth. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Volume 16 (14), 1354-1355. 10.1080/00131857.2018.1501944. 10.1162/016366000560665

Flisfeder, Matthew. (2018). "Trump" - What Does the Name Signify?; or, Protofascism and the Alt-Right: Three Contradictions of the Present Conjuncture. Cultural Politics, Volume 14 (1). 10.1215/1732197-4312844

Hamilton, Conrad. (2020). The Spectre of Post-Modern Neo-Marxism. In B. Burgis, C. Hamilton, M. McManus, & M. Trejo, Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson.

Inglehart, Ronald. (2000). Globalization and Postmodern Values. Washington Quarterly, Volume 23 (1), 215-228.

McManus, Matthew. (2020). Critique of the Left. In B. Burgis, C. Hamilton, M. McManus, & M. Trejo, Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson.

McManus, Matthew. (2020). What is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous Times. Zero Books.

Zizek, Slavoj. (2020). Jordan Peterson as a Symptom of...What?. In B. Burgis, C. Hamilton, M. McManus, & M. Trejo, Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson.

Wendy, Brown. (2019). In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia University. Educational Philosophy and Theory.