Postmodern scepticism

How do you get a hundred people in tin foil hats to queue outside your door? Easy – you stick a sign like this one outside.

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I mention this because Bing McGandhi has asked what a Skeptical Humanities Journal would look like. He imagines it as a journal against postmodernism – except that wouldn’t work for a few reasons, three of them being attributes three, four and five of a New Theory. I’ll dig them out so you don’t have to traipse back to the original post.

1. Whatever it is you’re studying will provide the perfect example of the bold insights that New Theory can bring to a topic.
2. Any praise of another New Theorist’s work is also praise of your work as it recognises the importance of New Theory.
3. Any criticism of another New Theorist’s work does not apply to your work as your work will be significantly different in at least three important aspects, and the criticism does not recognise the vibrant diversity of New Theory.
4. Any failure of New Theory to solve any questions people were asking before its arrival simply illustrates that people were asking the wrong questions.
5. Old Theory is the product of the political prejudices of the time. Awkward questions from Old Theorists can therefore be dismissed. The same would apply to New Theory, were it not for the fact that New Theory is far too new to be critiqued in the same way.

I can sympathise with Bing, a lot of self-consciously postmodern writing hits these features head-on. The problem I have is that I’ve also read some awful wannabe-science papers which do exactly the same. In archaeology there are some good papers on complexity, but at the same time there are some astonishingly bad papers too. A new cliché which is catching on is that an individual is a fractal of society. It’s an appeal to homologies from the mathematics of complexity and discoveries in physics. It’s very pro-science and pro-modernity. It’s only flaw is that it’s utter rubbish which actually removes meaning from what it being said. If you disagree read the previous link, or give me the Hausdorff dimension of the Church of England.

The existence of bad postmodernists isn’t an argument against postmodernism any more than some awful meme paperbacks are arguments against social evolution. Postmodernism, being the mainstream since the 1980s has been the safe choice for bad academics. As fashion changes and agency or memetics become popular then these growth areas will attract lightweight scholars of their own and we’ll have some really atrocious papers based on other ideas to look forward to.

I’m actually quite comfortable with a lot of ideas which are postmodernist. I simply have grave doubts about whether postmodernism, as a philosophically meaningful term, exists. It helps if you think about what postmodernism is and Bing is spot on when he says a lot of self-proclaimed postmodernists really don’t want to do that. Indeed if you hold to point 3 it’s impossible, or is it? I think postmodernists are like lions.

You cannot come up with a perfect definition of a lion. For any category lion which you define I can find an exception which breaks your definition. You think lions are animals found in Africa? Well what about this lion in Berlin zoo? Ok, lions are cats with four legs have four legs? What about this lion which has just had an argument with a somewhat bigger lion? Ok, a lion is a big cat which, when healthy, has four legs and originates in Africa? Meet this cheetah.

It’s a matter of how pedantic you want to be when you define lion, or postmodernist. But that doesn’t really matter because real life doesn’t work like that. If you’re on stretching your legs while on safari in Kenya and you see one of these things hurtling towards you, roaring, you’re not going to try and categorise it before you take action. You’ll run for the jeep and drive off pronto. And the same would be true if you met a lion. The definition doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough.

For my definition I’m going to ignore postmodernism in architecture and art. Here it has a clear and vigorous meaning in how it relates to the modern style. It’s visibly different and bold, which might be why postmodernists in the humanities are happy to draw connections to it. Until literature critics start building eclectically styled buildings on a regular basis then I’ll work from the principle that things like postmodern architecture is an inspiration rather than part of the same movement. In one major aspect I’d argue that postmodern architecture and postmodern humanities are in direct opposition – and this is where the Skeptical Journal has its problem.

One frequent feature of postmodern thought in the humanities is that is embraces scepticism. To some extent this is why I think it was a bad idea to use the word postmodern for postmodern thought. Postmodern architecture for example firmly adheres to the Laws of Physics and doesn’t seek to challenge them. Postmodern art engages with modern art as it does with other styles of art to create something new. In contrast postmodernism in the humanities is a conscious attempt to step outside of modernity. Part of this process is sceptically critiquing the modern approach. A problem with this as a defining feature of postmodernism is that many modern progressive schools of thought argue for exactly the same scepticism. Modern science for example is built on the principle of critique. This isn’t just about ontology, what the world is – but also about epistemology because they also want to know how they know something.

So what else is postmodernism? Another element is that postmodernism see polyvalency in materials and concepts. Take for instance a stone axes, which is always a popular example with archaeologists. If I give it to you it’s a gift. It can also be a symbol of virility, hey ladies get a load of my big chopper (for more on the sexy handaxe there’s this paper by Kohn and Mithen). They can be a status symbol or something exotic (see Hannah Lynch’s work which I can’t find online), they can be a thing of value for the effort expended (Gabriel Cooney is working on something like this). It can be a revered artefact, some old axes are found in later contexts in prehistory. After all that you can also chop wood with them. Additionally it can have several of these meanings at the same time.

This isn’t a uniquely postmodern insight thought. It’s long been acknowledged in statistics and science that meaning varies depending on the perspective and scale with which you examine something. This didn’t need postmodernism to be discovered. In archaeology Lewis Binford, who was very keen on making archaeology a science, was ascribing multiple meaning to artefacts.

Ok, but here’s another thing. Postmodernists have the annoying habit of analysing things in their social context all the while. Science many argue is a product of society. All things are products of their historical context and loaded with political meaning. If I pop down to Asda for a pint of milk then I’m participating a culture of repression of (underpaid workers / women, who historically have had unequal access to management positions in supermakets / indigenous large supermarket chains / cows – delete according to taste). Yet looking at the society which produces materials and ideologies is rather an old idea to anyone who’s read Marx or Engels, who were keenly aware of the impact of the times people lived in on their societies.

There certainly seems to be something postmodern. It has a distinctive language. At the same time when you examine it closely it doesn’t seem to offer anything new. Vítor Oliveira Jorge notes in his Archaeology, the modern and the postmodern, Portugal, and my role in all this – extracts of a letter to a distinguished colleague:

In fact, for me, for instance, the word “postmodern”, born in architecture as you know better than me, means practically nothing…it is just a convention to put at ourselves at a certain distance from certain principles that governed Enlightenment and that were practically considered like a religion, I mean, a replacement of theology by science.

That to me is the key to understanding postmodernism and much of the self-conscious writing of any theoretical movement. Postmodernism is about creating distance and being exclusionary. By its very name postmodernism delineates the difference between them and us.

At the same time though other schools of thought have also generated their own language. Partly this is to grease the wheels of language and make communication easier. It might be to label a hitherto unstudied concept. Still, even with these reasons it helps create and cement social groups by having a private language whatever the source of the new school.

I think this is a cause of why postmodernism can annoy. For some it’s not a matter of discovering something new, it’s about creating social rules for study. Postmodernism is a particularly good target for ire because, philosophically, there is nothing postmodern to critique. Postmodernism is not a coherent epistemology, I don’t think merely being sceptical would keep postmodernism out of a Skeptical Humanities Journal any more than it would bar entry to any other socio-political ideology.

I don’t know if there’s an inherent problem with the peer-review policy of some journals, because some journals don’t seriously enforce peer-review. I what I would like to see is any interdisciplinary paper submitted to an academic journal is peer-reviewed in all the relevant disciplines rather than just the one the journal represents. If your journal doesn’t do that then your journal is not really peer-reviewed is it? Ideally there shouldn’t be a difference between a sceptical journal and an academic journal.

The question would be are there enough philosophers in the world who’d be willing to review yet another philosophy-lite paper.