re: #187 Decatur Deb

Postmodernism Generator and the Reverse-Turing Test
(A) human can be declared unintelligent if his or her writing cannot be told apart from a generated one.
en.wikipedia.org

The success of the Postmodernism bot simultaneously proves and disproves the truth of the approach.

As someone who’s actually read postmodernists…including really obnoxious poorly structured ones…that is not an effective simulation of postmodernism because postmodernism isn’t one thing with one tone any more than Modernism is. If I’m generous—and I shouldn’t be, given the kind of clout-chasers that use stuff like this to discount everything that denies their own sense of objectivity and then in the breach turned out to just be assholes—the “algorithmically generated postmodern article” vaguely resembles an 90s-era grad schooler attempting to cobble together a postmodern piece at the last minute.

I read a lot of those between 97 and 00.

If you are playacting as someone disgusted by postmodernism, it will absolutely provide you with sufficient jimmie-rustling jargon that you can continue to be mad at the guy you made up—that’s Richard Dawkins career now, and it certainly pays the bills. But we’re in 2021 and the people who beat this “anti-post-modern” drum the hardest have spent two decades demonstrating that there were always arguing in bad faith: postmodernism was just the boogeyman phrase they used to attack any concept that they as paleoconservatives are uncomfortable with.

(They have applied this exact same moral panic campaign to Boas and “cultural relativism.” You will be shocked, shocked, that their alternative position is that their culture is superior and its values are not relative…a position adopted while blowing small children apart in the Islamic Middle East in the name of “secular” European morals.)

There are a lot of postmodernists I don’t like…but bad faith criticism is not miscible with good faith criticism. That Wendy Doniger is far too effusive in her interpretations of Sanskrit literature does not make her condemnation by Hindu nationalists justified. That Derrida is just a loop of contentiousness does not mean that Jordan Peterson has a point beyond projecting his anxiety on the world. Shallow modernists—people with one central idea that just want their axiom accepted—have a lot of motives to ding a model of inquiry that questions core axioms and accusing the questioners of being both unserious and sinister.

The other thing I’d point out is that “postmodernism” is the scapegoat for the distinct quality drop in academic publications prompted by publish or perish and tying career (and thus compensation) to volume of work. There exist countless shitty journals with no proofing because people needed to publish and that’s the fastest way to attain capacity; peer review is borked because academics both act in complicity in allowed other academics to do shoddy work and keep their job, but also because the power dynamic of reviewer/reviewee leads to nepotism and sometimes outright extortion. If you acknowledge that universities operating like a business is creating worse research because there’s not enough time or money; that grant givers are frequently fishing for research that’s revolutionary-sounding rather than incremental…then academia as an outgroup of capitalist structure is a failure: competition for resources didn’t create better quality outcomes.

I see this crop up on this board periodically and…why the fuck is anyone caving into this particular right wing talking point? Are social scientists capable of pretension and tangled language? Yes.

But we’re now in the destroyed world that the tweed-wearing old guard warned about…but the extinction event came from the opposite direction. College doesn’t mean anything because they’ve become a real estate portfolio with a day care attached. The vast majority of people cannot differentiate the validity of a stray social media post from a peer-reviewed publication, and that happened because of a heady mix of the internet and the cultural agenda of (mostly conservative) grifters that needed there to be no critical thinking skills. The idea that before the postmodern there was structure and rising action to society was always false, but it was rendered especially false when the advocates of that position started inventing reasons why white developed nations were allowed to kill people in non-white undeveloped nations as a kind of cultural self-defense.

Anti-postmodernism is a moral panic that claimed, and still claim, that postmodern concepts will destroy the ability of people to know “what is true”…but the forces that have actually destroyed meaning and epistemology in the current day world are the same people that decried postmodernism.