Talk:Postmodernism/Archive 7

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proposed revisions

Hi, Everyone, I'd like to propose some revisions to the entry. I think it should begin with a brief history of how the term was used initially for a movement in art, architecture, music, and literature in the 1960s. French Post-Structuralist philosophy was then included under the term by Jameson in 1982. It would help to draw attention to that naming process, so that readers are more aware of how the concept of "postmodernism" (PM) came about and how it came to "name" so diverse a range of undertakings, from art to philosophy. I notice that the entry contains many assertions that are not footnoted but that make large and to my mind inaccurate claims. I'm a specialist in Post-Structuralism (PS) and Derrida especially. I've always felt that the assignment of "relativism" or "a rejection of universalism" to PS and to him was inaccurate. Yet those characterizations persist through repetition. It would be impossible to find textual references that justify them in any of the PS thinkers. That probably explains why such characterizations are made without footnotes to primary texts. So unless someone can produce primary textual references for such claims, attributions, or characterizations, they should be removed. I think that's one of the basic rules for Wikipedia entries. What I'd like to do is post a revision of the opening sections. I'd include a list of other smaller amendments that address especially the mischaracterization of PS as relativist or as anti-universalist or anti-scientific. Thoughts? Mryan1451 (talk) 16:26, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Mryan1451

I think this proposal needs to be disassembled into more specific and manageable proposals. But I will say that unless someone can produce primary textual references for such claims, attributions, or characterizations, they should be removed is pretty much the direct opposite of a core WP policy, WP:V - independent WP:SECONDARY sources are preferred to WP:PRIMARY ones. Yes, this sometimes means that WP repeats errors made by secondary sources, but ideally in such cases other secondary or tertiary sources can be used to correct the record.

So while I am all in favor of nuance, precision and an historical treatment of the evolution of a topic, the new poster will have to give some thought to WP:NPOV and WP:RS policies before doing anything too WP:BOLD. Newimpartial (talk) 16:35, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I'm the original poster of this entry. I'm new to this so forgive if this is not the right way to proceed. I'm just typing in a response and hoping it works. First, I think the problem with discussions of PM and with the PM entry as a result is precisely what the last poster cites as a method of revision: more secondary sources. PM has been smothered with inaccurate secondary sources. I'm suggesting that rather than continue to reproduce inaccuracies, we need to go back to the original sources to see if what appear to be inaccuracies in the PM entry are justified. I know certain of the original sources really well, and I know in regard to Derrida, for example, that self-replicating secondary sources tend often to be inaccurate. Indeed, you just have to look at the opening section of our PM entry to find them. Here is an example from the entry: "Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-consciousness, self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence." Derrida and Rorty are the two primary philosophers who might be characterized as PM. Where in their work does one find criticism of "objective reality"? Morality is even more problematic, since neither discusses morality. Ditto human nature and science. Not discussed by either. Possibly you'd find doubts about "social progress" in Lyotard, but he's the first of the secondary commentators, not an original PM thinker. Mryan1451 (talk) 17:00, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Mryan1451

I am trying to help you, not obstruct you, but anyone who wants to contribute to WP has to internalize the relevant principles (of which, WP:LISTGAP will show you how and why I indented your comment). That means throwing away the starting point "what do I, as an editor, know about this topic" and substituting "what do the reliable sources available to me say about this topic" and working from there. For example, I think I could quite easily find sources excluding Richard Rorty from the topic of Postmodermism, but unless I actually present such sources (as citations) I have no justification for saying so in an article.

Verifiability and the preference for SECONDARY over PRIMARY sources are fundamental to Wikipedia, and it is difficult for any editor to make a positive contribution to the encyclopaedia without internalizing these principles. Your conviction that there are many misleading secondary sources about Postmodernism is undoubtedly true, but corrections to WP articles need to be sourced to secondary rather than primary sources. For example, citing secondary source mistakes and then confronting them with primary sources that appear to contradict the secondary sources is an example of what Wikipedia calls original research, and is not allowed in articles. Newimpartial (talk) 17:13, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the help, and I didn't mean to suggest you were not being helpful. I have studied the neutral point of view page and the secondary source page. Likely the best way to proceed would be for me to write up proposed substitutions for sections of the entry that I think are inaccurate. There are three areas that concern me. The first section is not an accurate description of the movement. I'd like to make it more accurate. The second section concerns Derrida. Again, the section is inaccurate and I'd like to propose a more accurate account of his work. Finally, I'd like to make changes to the final section on Doug Kellner and Critical Theory and make it more accurate. Doug is not a post-modernist, and Critical Theory is a German movement, while philosophical PM was a French movement. A final section on PM should not be devoted to a German movement that was parallel to PM but not part of it. Doug is a good friend and a co-author of mine, and he was agreeable to me making these changes. He may chime in here at some point. Once I've proposed these new sections and posted them here on the Talk page for all of you to review, we can discuss. Anything I propose that seems helpful can be added or substituted and anything judged not helpful can be discarded. I hope that seems like a reasonable way to proceed. In my proposed revisions, I will retain as much of the existing text as possible. I know others have done great work on this entry, and I'm not suggesting we discard it. As for the issue of secondary versus primary sources, I think what I meant was that we have a duty to be accurate here. Secondary commentators have a duty to say things that are justified by the texts they are supposedly summarizing. If none of the PM writers say "there is no morality," then it is inaccurate and irresponsible to write a Wikipedia entry in which that position is imputed to the writers. That's what I mean when I say--let's make this entry more accurate. Mryan1451 (talk) 12:31, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Briefly, I have indented your comment above, but would appreciate your doing so yourself in future. Also, since you have mentioned Kellner, please review WP:COI and be careful to abide by it where you are looking at WP mentions of people you know. And above all, remember that it is not about what you know to be true on WP, it is what you can show reliable, secondary sources saying (and not per COI ones you have written yourself).

Finally, you can't go too far wrong making specific proposals here on Talk to change the article, since the worst that can happen is that the proposed changes will not receive consensus. You could look at Talk:Spiked (magazine) for a recent example of this process working, and Talk:Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory for a recent example of it failing somewhat spectacularly. These examples should be edifying. Newimpartial (talk) 13:17, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Everyone. Here below is a proposed revision of the first section of the Postmodernism section. I've added detail and I've provided more history. Ihab Hassan was the first to use the term to describe a movement in literature in the early 1960s. Later writers like Lyotard and Jameson added to Hassan's work and expanded the reach of the term "postmodern". It will help to lay out that "story" or history for people completely unused to the movement. I also mention a wider range of uses of postmodern ideas in fields such as Gender Studies (Butler) and Ethics (Baumann) that will help new students of the movement understand its wide range and impact. I have preserved all the ideas in the previous introduction. The proposed revision follows:

"Postmodernism is a term used by cultural historians to describe a movement in the arts, literature, architecture, and philosophy that began in the middle of the 20th century and continues to exercise influence in a wide array of fields from Ethics to Gender Studies. The term is used interchangeably to name the era after Modernism and the cultural tendencies and intellectual ideas characteristic of that era.

Three cultural historians provided early accounts of Postmodernism. Ihab Hassan first used the term "postmodernism" to describe mid-20th century literature in his essay "The Dismemberment of Orpheus" in 1963. According to Hassan, postmodern literature is marked by an embrace of the irrational elements of human life and a distrust of reason, history, social organization, and the capacity of language to name reality. For Hassan, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1939) marked the beginning of what he called "POSTmodernISM" in literature. In 1978, Jean-Francois Lyotard in "What is Postmodernism?" argued that the postmodern movement represented the end of "grand narratives" and totalizing theories such as Humanism and Marxism. The postmodern world was characterized by a proliferation of small narratives and particular struggles over issues such as gender, race, and colonialism at the expense of unitary accounts of history such as Marxism, which saw all social conflict in economic terms. In 1991, Fredric Jameson published "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in which he argued that the intellectual movements in France of the 1960s and 19670s that up to that point had been known by the terms "deconstruction" and "Post-Structuralism" should be included under the term "Postmodernism." According to Jameson, Postmodern philosophy, literature, and art were expressions of Late Capitalism that mimicked consumer capitalism and represented a waning of affect and a turn toward surfaces as opposed to depths of meaning. Postmodernism in philosophy is generally defined by an attitude of criticism or skepticism toward the western philosophic tradition, especially metaphysics, rationalism, and idealism. In social theory, postmodernism is associated with accounts of how power is maintained in western societies through discourse and ideology. In the arts, postmodernism is linked to experimentation with new forms that demonstrate greater irony regarding traditional unities as well as disrespect for the hierarchical division between High Art and Popular Culture. Postmodernism came into being at the same time as post-World War II uprisings against colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, war, and white supremacy in the West and the "Third World." To a certain extent, it represents a similar insurgency in the intellectual and artistic realm. Central to postmodernism in philosophy and social criticism is the critique of power, hierarchy, and authority. Since its inception, postmodern criticism has expanded into other realms such as Gender Studies, where Judith Butler uses it to question gender identity, Legal Studies, where Critical Legal Theorists such as Clare Dalton draw on it to critique contract doctrine, Ethics where Zygmunt Bauman uses it to advocate for an ethics of openness to alterity, and Literary Criticism, where Barbara Herrnstein Smith uses it to draw attention to the contingency of values and Barbara Johnson uses it to locate an irresolvable tension between rhetoric and ideation. Postmodernism also appears in fields such as religion and ethics, where it is associated with the idea that moral judgment is contingent on context. The movement is also associated with the critique of "Enlightenment rationality," the idea that reason, conceived in idealist terms, exists outside of social settings and discursive processes. Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature, contemporary art, and music. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction, post-structuralism, and institutional critique, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Richard Rorty, Zygmunt Bauman, and Judith Butler. Postmodernism spawned many detractors such as Jurgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton who disagreed with its unrelentingly critical approach to knowledge, cultural authority, and idealist or metaphysical concepts of rationality. The movement was accused of relativism and of undermining the ideal of objective knowledge attainable through science and reason. Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse and include arguments that postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. Post-Structural philosophy, notably the work of Jacques Derrida, has been especially influential and controversial. Derrida derived lessons from Structural Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) in a critique of traditional continental metaphysics. Those lessons were: 1. all words bear an arbitrary relationship to the things they name; 2. all words are signs and are therefore conventional; 3. language is like chess a rule-bound system in which each term has meaning in relation to the other terms in the system and is not sustained by an external ground or foundation in the world; 4. all words have an identity through their differences from other terms. This last "diacritical" principle became the basis of Derrida's critique of metaphysics. According to Derrida, all attempts to establish an authoritative model of true ideas in the mind result in instability and complexity; simple models of truth are made possible by differential processes that cannot themselves be represented in the form of conceptual identities. They remain outside knowledge while making knowledge possible. This aporia whereby identity is constituted by an otherness or alterity it cannot subsume characterizes all metaphysical thinking that attempts to establish an authoritative model of truth as a true idea in the mind, according to Derrida. Other Post-Structuralist French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault argued that knowledge occurs in discourses and can serve the interests of power. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari portrayed human history as vital flows of matter governed by movements of desire, settlement, and "deterritorialization." Luce Irigaray contended phallocentrism was executed through epistemological regimes that downplayed women's way of knowing, which was more material than metaphysical. And Jean Baudrillard argued that cultural semiotic orders subsume reality in the interests of those in power." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mryan1451 (talk • contribs) 18:01, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Hello, Mryan. The draft text had two main problems that make it contrary to WP policy in its current form. (1) The opening paragraphs of a WP article, or LEAD, need to summarize the article as a whole. This does not; please see WP:LEADFOLLOWSBODY for ideas. (2) This text is cited entirely to WP:PRIMARY sources and therefore consists of what WP calls original research or synthesis. It therefore cannot be used, even in the article body: WP demands independent WP:SECONDARY sources where they exist - as they certainly do for this topic. Newimpartial (talk) 18:32, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

I will revise the opening part of my proposed revision of section one of the Postmodernism entry and make it more general. I agree that one should begin with a general description. As for your second objection, Hassan, Lyotard, and Jameson are not primary sources. The primary sources are the postmodernists themselves. For example, Hassan discusses postmodern fiction writers such as Barthe, Barthelme, and Beckett among many others. Hassan is a classic example of a secondary commentator on a literary movement. He was the first scholar of postmodernism and is himself not a practitioner of the movement. Ditto Lyotard and Jameson. Lyotard was invited in The Postmodern Condition to comment on postmodernism as a movement and did so. Again, his is a classic secondary text by a commentator. Jameson is even more in that secondary category of commentator. The primary postmodern agents he discussed were architects such as Portman and Venturi. Jameson is not a primary postmodernist; he is himself a literary critic who happens to disagree with Postmodernism. Finally, I am myself a secondary commentator on PM, and I draw on my own books when I describe the movement as I have done here. What I have written is not original work. If you like, I will insert footnotes to those books. You are citing procedural and bureaucratic reasons. Can you please focus on the substance of the entry and of the revisions I have proposed. Where do you see inaccuracy in what I have proposed? Please offer specific revisions rather than blanket condemnations. We need to make this entry more accurate. It does not live up to the standards one expects from Wikipedia. The entry is now misleading scholars in other fields. It is our responsibility to make sure that does not happen. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mryan1451 (talk • contribs) 20:23, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

I didn't notice Jameson there; you are quite correct that he could be considered a secondary source in this context. However, his major work on this topic dates from the 20th century; and WP policy also insists on recent secondary sources where they exist, as they do in this case. So 21st-century sources are strongly preferred, and even if secondary, a source from the 1960s is not policy-compliant in an instance like this where the scholarly discourse has evolved and more recent sources exist. Newimpartial (talk) 20:31, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Please bear in mind that one of the first things I said when I initiated this conversation is that I felt the concept of "PM" needed to be given a history. When you are writing history, you have to cite the past. Hassan, Lyotard, and Jameson were the first in the past to assemble for us a coherent theory of PM. Think of it as writing a history of scholarship on PM that in fact created PM for us. PM needs to be described both as a historical evolution and as a more or less coherent set of concerns. Mryan1451 (talk) 20:41, 12 October 2020 (UTC)MRyan1451

Look up. This is the second part of my response. I posted it already but it seems to have disappeared. I looked at the wikipedia guidelines you evoked. They do not say "secondary" sources are required. The word used is "sources." It does not distinguish primary from secondary. Is there some other place where that distinction is used? I'll be happy to go through my proposed revision and provide footnotes both to primary PM sources and secondary PM commentators to justify everything I have written. Would that help? Mryan1451 (talk) 20:50, 12 October 2020 (UTC)Mryan1451

This is my third note. I am looking further at the rest of the entry, and there are serious problems with it. Ideas and positions are attributed to postmodernist philosophers that nowhere appear in postmodern writing. I first became aware that the Postmodernism entry was inaccurate when I heard Steven Pinker describe postmodernism and realized he got it wrong. When I came to the entry in Wikipedia, I saw why. This entry is seriously inaccurate. Positions, arguments, and ideas are attributed without proper scholarly citation. Something called "Faith and Reason" is cited as a source for positions attributed to PM that nowhere appear in postmodern writing. That seems inappropriate, as does the use of britannicas and dictionaries to define PM. Entry writers should use standard academic scholarship and should be well-versed in it. If someone has to look something up in a dictionary, they probably should not write on it. The extremely tendentious nature of this entry as written is encapsulated in the conclusion where postmodernism, which is practiced by some of the most committed liberal to leftist voices in intellectual life over the past half century, is described as deriving from Fascism, a rightwing movement. I think I've reached the point where I'm ready to describe this entry as "delirious" rather than simply "inaccurate." I don't think I've ever read a wikipedia entry that is so completely and entirely tendentious. Since you, Impartial, do not seem inclined to discuss the substance of the entry and why it is inaccurate, we should probably get other scholars involved and submit this to dispute resolution. What do you think? Mryan1451 (talk) 23:10, 12 October 2020 (UTC)Mryan1451

Dispute resolution in Wikipedia is intended to help with certain forms of dispute between editors, not disputes between editors and policy. Also, please note that WP:RS and WP:V policies enjoin independent, reliable sources. While sources that are independent of the subject are not always WP:SECONDARY, in the case of historiographical articles like this one the best sources generally have both attributes; also, WP:PRIMARY sources must by policy give place to SECONDARY ones wherever both are available (and I have included the links to PRIMARY, SECONDARY and Independent sources in this paragraph.

Once again, I am not in any way resistant to your desire to improve the accuracy of this article, nor do I necessarily object to any interpretation you have offered here. However, your program that When you are writing history, you have to cite the past applies to the sources WP should use in this situation, but *not* to the WP articles themselves, which should take their cue for what to include by a WP:DUE treatment of what the secondary sources directly cited in the WP article point to as their own most important references. This is not a topic where the first, or the revised draft of history is to be written on Wikipedia; rather, it is already written in the secondary sources, and the task of WP editors is to identify and reflect the best of the recent secondary and tertiary scholarship. I have no doubt that this article could do so much better, but it is absolutely essential to start from (and cite) the best, recent, independent secondary sources on the topic. Newimpartial (talk) 00:06, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Mryan1451, your proposal to rewrite the lead above has problems, as Newimpartial pointed out. It's not in accord with WP:LEAD. Not only was it too long and detailed, but it lacked sources. The current lead only lacks sources because the idea is that the material is WP:Verifiable in the body of the article, and that it summarizes what is there. See WP:LEADCITE and WP:LEADFOLLOWSBODY. So you have two options regarding the lead: (1) point out something there that is not supported by anything in the body, or (2) point out something in the body that you feel should be in the lead. Regarding the body content, you can make a case that (1) existing content misrepresents its source, (2) that it is using a source that fails WP:Reliable sources, or (3) that some content should be added because important points or points of view are missing. See WP:Scholarship (part of WP:Reliable sources) especially.

I strongly suggest getting more familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, especially the ones you have been linked to. Regarding postmodernism, while some features are consistently identified as such by recent academic commentators, as is often the case in philosophy, different scholars often have different ideas about how to interpret other things. We handle these disagreements in accord with WP:NPOV, and especially WP:Due weight. One example you gave above related to a connection to fascism. In the article, this point of view has WP:In-text attribution to Richard Wolin. Not only is his expertise highly relevant, being in intellectual history, but his book is published by a university press, and his research is secondary to that of the postmodernists themselves. As sources go, that is basically as reliable and as "due" as it can get. And yet, we attribute the view to him as it seems likely that other scholars would disagree. Since this very well-handled statement you seem to think should not be there, that tells me that you need to get more familiar with the policies and guidelines.

I suggest that any future proposals each focus on one sentence, or maybe paragraph. Larger proposals are much harder to evaluate, to compare to what is there, and reply to, and Wikipedians often watch many different articles and are busy with them also. Crossroads ^-talk- 03:52, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions. Here below is a shorter proposed revision of the opening section of the entry. If this version is not convincing, then I will do as you suggest and make specific suggestions for revision and addition to the existing introduction. I think rewriting it would be a wiser way to go though. I agree that one should follow the template of broad-to-narrow.

The current opening needs revision for two reasons. It depicts PM as something outside of time. Telling readers at the start that PM was a movement in time that eventually and retroactively came to be recognized as something coherent is important because PM is itself postmodern because it lacks an identity. It evolved out of connections rather than being created at one go by a unified group of creators. The second reason is bias or tendentiousness. It is important to present movements like PM as accurately and neutrally as possible. The current opening presents imputations by detractors (meaninglessness, obscurantism, etc) in much too prominent a place. The movement itself needs to be described first so that new readers can form their own opinion of it. And it needs to be described objectively and accurately. There is an inappropriate sense of negative polemic in the current entry as a whole. Choosing to end with the ludicrous accusation of fascism (and by implication Nazism) is only the most prominent example of this, especially given that many of the most prominent PM practitioners were or are Jewish. Please take a look at the new proposal and let me know if it works. I have striven to preserve the original version as much as possible, but I have added needed detail and needed history.

As for the whole entry, I just looked at it again, and there are several requests for more work on sections. I could undertake that work and fill in those sections for you, but I can only do that with your cooperation. Let me know what you think. Like many entries with multiple authors, this one is very disjointed. The best thing would be to do a single rewrite from start to finish, filling in need new material to address existing requests for help. I think Doug Kellner would be willing to help, so it likely would be a joint effort. And if you two have time to join in, it can be a quadratic effort.

Here is the new proposed version of the first part of the entry:

"Postmodernism is a movement in the arts, literature, architecture, and philosophy that began in the middle of the 20th century and continues to exercise influence in a wide array of fields from Ethics to Gender Studies. The term is used interchangeably to name the era after Modernism and the cultural tendencies and intellectual ideas characteristic of that era.

Postmodernism in philosophy is characterized by an attitude of criticism regarding the western philosophic tradition, especially metaphysics, rationalism, and idealism. In social theory, postmodernism is associated with analyses of how power is maintained in western societies through discourse and ideology. In the arts, postmodernism is linked to experimentation with new forms that demonstrate greater irony regarding traditional practices of realist representation as well as disrespect for the hierarchical division between High Art and Popular Culture. In gender and ethics, postmodern thinking emphasizes differential relations and their effect on notions of identity.

Postmodernism came into being at the same time as post-World War II uprisings against colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, war, and white supremacy in the West and the "Third World." To a certain extent, it represents a similar insurgency in the intellectual and artistic realm. Central to postmodernism in philosophy and social criticism is the critique of power, hierarchy, and authority.

Since its inception, postmodern criticism has expanded into other realms such as Gender Studies, where Judith Butler uses it to question gender identity, Legal Studies, where Critical Legal Theorists such as Clare Dalton draw on it to critique contract doctrine, Ethics where Zygmunt Bauman uses it to advocate for an ethics of openness to alterity, and Literary Criticism, where Barbara Herrnstein Smith uses it to draw attention to the contingency of values and Barbara Johnson uses it to locate an irresolvable tension between rhetoric and ideation. Postmodernism also appears in fields such as religion, where it is associated with the idea that moral judgment is contingent on context. The movement is also often linked to the critique of "Enlightenment rationality," the idea that reason, conceived in idealist terms, exists outside of social settings and discursive processes.

Three cultural historians provided early accounts of Postmodernism. Ihab Hassan first used the term "postmodernism" to describe mid-20th century literature in his essay "The Dismemberment of Orpheus" in 1963. According to Hassan, postmodern literature is marked by an embrace of the irrational elements of human life and a distrust of reason, history, social organization, and the capacity of language to name reality. For Hassan, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1939) marked the beginning of what he called "POSTmodernISM" in literature.

In 1979, Jean-Francois Lyotard in "The Postmodern Condition" argued that the postmodern movement represented the end of "grand narratives" and totalizing theories such as Humanism and Marxism. The postmodern world was characterized by a proliferation of small narratives and particular struggles over issues such as gender, race, and colonialism at the expense of unitary accounts of history such as Marxism, which saw all social conflict in economic terms.

In 1991, Fredric Jameson published "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in which he argued that the intellectual movements in France of the 1960s and 19670s that up to that point had been known by the terms "deconstruction" and "Post-Structuralism" should be included under the term "Postmodernism." According to Jameson, Postmodern philosophy, literature, and art were expressions of Late Capitalism that mimicked consumer capitalism and represented a waning of affect and a turn toward surfaces as opposed to depths of meaning.

Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature, contemporary art, and music. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction, post-structuralism, and institutional critique, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Richard Rorty, Zygmunt Bauman, and Judith Butler.

Postmodernism spawned many detractors such as Jurgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton who disagreed with its unrelentingly critical approach to knowledge, cultural authority, and idealist or metaphysical concepts of truth and rationality. The movement was accused of relativism and of undermining the ideal of objective knowledge attainable through science and reason. Some argue postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.

Post-Structural philosophy, notably the work of Jacques Derrida, has been especially influential and controversial. Derrida derived lessons from Structural Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) in a critique of traditional continental metaphysics. Those lessons were: 1. all words bear an arbitrary relationship to the things they name; 2. all words are signs and are therefore conventional; 3. language is like chess a rule-bound system in which each term has meaning in relation to the other terms in the system and is not sustained by an external ground or foundation in the world; 4. all words have an identity through their differences from other terms. This last "diacritical" principle became the basis of Derrida's critique of metaphysics. According to Derrida, all attempts to establish an authoritative model of true ideas in the mind result in instability and complexity; simple models of truth are made possible by differential processes that cannot themselves be represented in the form of conceptual identities. They remain outside knowledge while making knowledge possible. This aporia whereby identity is constituted by an otherness or alterity it cannot subsume characterizes all metaphysical thinking that attempts to establish an authoritative model of truth as a true idea in the mind, according to Derrida.

Other Post-Structuralist French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault argued that knowledge occurs in discourses and can serve the interests of power. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari portrayed human history as vital flows of matter governed by movements of desire, settlement, and "deterritorialization." Luce Irigaray contended phallocentrism was executed through epistemological regimes that downplayed women's way of knowing, which was more material than metaphysical. And Jean Baudrillard argued that cultural semiotic orders subsume reality in the interests of those in power." Mryan1451 (talk) 17:19, 13 October 2020 (UTC)Mryan1451 "

Very difficult to understand this...

This is a really tough article to understand. I think it should be more accessible given this term has entered common vernacular (I hear something labeled "post-modern" several times a day, probably as a slur). Someone not well versed in social science language is going to have a tough time with this, I think.

It's even more confusing when architecture seems to be a prominent component of post-modernism. 139.138.6.121 (talk) 13:43, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

I agree with the IP user. This article is extremely difficult to comprehend, particularly for the average reader. We should consider putting a template clean up message that the introduction is very confusing. Debate chess (talk) 01:41, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Accurate Representation of Sources

The section on Lyotard is not good. "where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is." No citation follows this. "Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the concept of truth that metanarratives presuppose." No citation follows this. "Postmodernist philosophers in general argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain." A citation does follow this, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on postmodernism. However, I've combed through it as best I can and simply can't any reference to any of these three ideas. If somebody else does, by all means disregard this. But as I see it, this is a misrepresentation of the cited material. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.27.15.105 (talk) 19:18, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Photographs of Personalities such as Orhan Pamuk

Reading this article and trying to digest the concept, I get to the pictures at the end and recognise someone familiar, Orhan Pamuk. I wonder about his relevance and there are numerous authors listed in the literature paragraph, but his name does not appear in the main text. Neither do the other photographed personalities. Please excuse my ignorance regarding any style guides or the like, but it is a little confusing. Is there an unstated implication that a photo of any such individual should be assumed to fit into the para next to the photo?? Very Bodgy! Call me both (talk) 06:12, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Complete new version from Post-Science http://postscience.com

Our paper on Culture Level Quotient has just been published: http://www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/jrph/article/view/3784/3941 which is a non-technical explanation of the previous publication of “Fuzzy Completeness Theory” http://www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/jrph/article/view/3725 http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/education/research/centres/stem/publications/pmej/pome35/index.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by Post.science (talk • contribs) 07:16, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Redirect

I have redirected the stub article Post-futurism here. Just making a post here. BSMRD (talk) 23:48, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Why is the Semiotics template embedded in the Postmodernism article?

There are only two references to semiotics in the Postmodernism article itself. OneSkyWalker (talk) 21:49, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Derrida and Lyotard, that's why. Simonm223 (talk) 13:11, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

What does this mean?

Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid-to-late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era.

This is incomprehensible to someone who doesn't speak in social-science language. What does this mean **exactly**? It's a philosophical term? It deals with architecture? It's "critical" of something (what, exactly is the "criticism"?). It's a whole "movement"? Who are the participants in this "movement"? What does this soup salad ultimately mean?

Please be **precise** when you define this.

This is one of the few encyclopedia articles that has left me more confused after reading it. Please re-work this so a simple engineer can understand it, given this term is used in common English vernacular now, every day (ie. - an accusation is leveraged against an individual, concept or lifestyle for being "postmodern", which IMHO, should probably be hyphenated).

When someone is accused of being postmodern, what exactly does it mean? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.138.6.121 (talk • contribs) 05:15, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

I fear the incomprehensibility is the very core of this thing - it's a bag of wind camouflaged by verbal lace doilies. But the sentence you quoted just says it is a way of thinking which disagrees with another way of thinking called modernism. It's like describing an animal by saying "well, it's different from a horse." But you can't expect anybody to describe something like that in one sentence. The text after that has more details.

Postmodernism seems to be basically an instance of the adolescent attitude "I am smarter than those who came before me", and thus without much substance. The main property is described in one of the other sentences of the lead, in contrast to modernism, [..] which generally regards the promotion of objective truths as an ideal form of discourse. That means postmodernists don't care whether what they say is right or wrong, and therefore make no effort to check. See also Bullshit. When someone accuses you of postmodernism, this is what they mean.

Philosophy often suffers from being described like one huge undividable lump where, before you can understand one specific philosophy, you need to understand all older philosophies first. So, have fun with modernism. And everything before it. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:48, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

That means postmodernists don't care whether what they say is right or wrong, and therefore make no effort to check.

That's an interesting definition, because that accusation has been leveraged against people who deny COVID-19, or certain scientific principals, for example, but I don't feel those individuals actually fit the definition of post-modernist (which seem to fall on the left of the political spectrum whereas the various deniers seem to fall to the right). This is a term, to me, that seem to describe something related to hipsterism or being "artsy". 139.138.6.121 (talk) 15:57, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

I did not say it is the definition of postmodernism. There are a lot of other impostors and bullshitters out there. At the moment I think of one windbag who certainly does not use "verbal lace doilies".

But all this does not contribute to improving the article, and therefore does not belong here. Sorry I went on that tangent. Can we please stop it? --Hob Gadling (talk) 17:27, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

I didn't mean to annoy -- honest. I just encounter this term used as a slur (more often than not), and I'm trying to understand it better. That's all. I think understanding this aspect of the term would certainly contribute to the article overall. 139.138.6.121 (talk) 17:37, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

There have been several well-meaning attempts to improve the lead of this article over the past ten years. Look back through the edits. The most recent such effort resulted in an article lead that was clearer and more accurate than the current one. After this considerable effort to improve the lead, one editor demoted the new lead to become an introduction and restored the original lead.sbelknap (talk) 14:17, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

It probably doesn't help that so many people who are associated with "postmodernism" as a school of thought disavowed any such association. Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition would make him a contender for a template for theoretical postmodernity but he later said that it was his worst book and at least partially disavowed it as a work to nearly the same extent as Libidinal Economy. Derrida had, likewise, a complicated relationship with the term and little interest in engaging with it as a systematic. You see similar prevarication from other theorists such as Félix Guattari - who was impacted sufficiently by Trotskyism that he generally preferred to be treated as part of that overall modern trend of thought. And of course Foucault infamously pretty much refused to be nailed down on nearly anything - claiming to be an historian among philosophers, a philosopher among historians. You'll excuse I'm focusing specifically on French theorists because that's where I'm most widely read. What it comes down to is that Postmodernism becomes a very slippery term, as often as not deployed as an accusation against academic rivals or as a short-hand for Continental philosophy as it exists after Sartre. Simultaneously it's used in various arts either to describe that artwork that emerged in a specific time or to suggest a Derridean focus on deconstruction - situating Alan Moore as a template for the postmodern artist. Honestly it'd probably be more effective to constrain the term in theory to Lyotard and Derrida and damn the extent to which they would detest it. But of course they pretty famously split over Marx and several other topics so even that constrained a definition becomes unstable. I guess what I'm saying is that you don't have to be hostile to late-20th century Continental philosophy to find Postmodernism a confounding term that is difficult to nail down. Effectively it becomes like that famous quote about pornography: I know it when I see it. Simonm223 (talk) 13:27, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Lede

It seems like the definition section was a previous attempt at the lede that got bumped downward but it reads basically as a better written and better sourced version of the lede (for example it accredits Habermas' critique of postmodernism to him directly rather than talking vaguely about some philosophers). I've been WP:BOLD and removed the old lede, instead moving the definition section up to serve as the lede. Simonm223 (talk) 13:47, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

It looks good, but I’m not sure if it’s a bit long/jargony. I’ll ask some offline friends their opinions and see what they think. Cheers, postleft on mobile! 14:44, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Boston333200.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:02, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Habermas

Seems odd to not have any mention of Habermas considering he's generally thought to be a key critic of Postmodernism, with The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy referring to Habermas as "The most prominent and comprehensive critic of philosophical postmodernism". https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#9 194.223.51.184 (talk) 00:03, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Criticisms section

The criticisms section of this is on my to-do list (to whit: I want to integrate the criticisms into the article better). I've removed a few criticisms that came from obvious non-experts however for the rest it's going to be a more difficult task of determining where those criticisms best fall within the overall structure of the article. Suggestions are very welcome. Simonm223 (talk) 13:10, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Since the Fringe theory noticeboard fandom has decided to weigh in I'd suggest they should quickly express a defense for how this commercial magazine article written by an anthropologist is suitable to understand philosophical epistemology. His "postmodernism is anti-science" approach is ignorant and should be disregarded as WP:UNDUE. Simonm223 (talk) 13:23, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Haha! "Commercial"? Do you mean to say that all pomo journals and all books written by pomos are free?

You sound exactly like a theologian or astrologer when someone does not accept their worldview. Those who disagree are simply defined to be "ignorant" without justification - see also Courtier's reply - and voila: the acceptance turns out to be unanimous.

When the subject is science, as with philosophy of science, rejecting scientists as ignoramuses is disingenious. If their criticism is fallacious, that can be explained. That is what scientists (especially scientific skeptics) do when ignoramuses attack them. --Hob Gadling (talk) 15:35, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Can we maintain a discussion here without resorting to personal attacks and name calling? It is counterproductive. Thanks. freshacconci (✉) 16:07, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Why is this placed as a response to my contribution? Can you tell the difference between an attack on a person and an attack on a person's reasoning? --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:38, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

It's a response to you because calling someone an ignoramus is a personal attack. And attacking a person's reasoning (your wording) is in fact a personal attack. freshacconci (✉) 15:29, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

WP:NPA is about attacking other Wikipedians. If you had actually read and understood both sentences in my contribution which contain the word - it is not that difficult - you would have noticed that I did not call anyone an ignoramus, not even any non-Wikipedians. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:49, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

None of what you wrote is civil. If you can't contribute without attacking others, indirectly or otherwise, you should excuse yourself from the discussion. freshacconci (✉) 13:15, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

None of what you wrote is more than a straw man. If you can't contribute to the subject, but can only make false accusations, you should not discuss at all. --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:24, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I think it would be helpful if instead of "commercial magazine article written by an anthropologist", we could refer to The War on Science, Anti-Intellectualism, and ‘Alternative Ways of Knowing’ in 21st-Century America by ecological anthropologist Homayun Sidky for the Skeptical Inquirer. Just so that we're clear on what exactly we're talking about. Vexations (talk) 16:08, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

And I reiterate that a position of "postmodernism is anti-science" depends on a highly selective and poorly informed grasp of the relevant literature. I'm sorry if my suggestion that critiques of an academic discipline be founded in an understanding of that discipline's literature make me sound like "a theologian or astrologer". Although I'm sure theologians would be very impressed to see such respect for their scholarship in an encyclopedia project. Simonm223 (talk) 16:23, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Can you provide some insight into what the relevant literature is in this case? It can't only be the postmodernist authors, so who is qualified to criticise postmodernism? Vexations (talk) 19:35, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, we don't dismiss WP:RS because we personally deem the sources not to have understood what the postmodernists were really saying. Crossroads ^-talk- 06:18, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Simonm223 you didn't answer my question, but would Habermas (in particular his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity be acceptable as "the relevant literature"? (I know I have a copy if the German edition somewhere, but I can't find it right now) Vexations (talk) 21:51, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I suppose I would be part of the alleged "fandom". My comment on the specific source is at the FTN discussion. To the extent that this is about how to present postmodernism's relationship to science in general, personally I could be convinced by RS explaining that it is not in fact associated with certain antiscientific claims (or that these claims are misunderstandings, etc), with sufficient weight for this to be placed prominently in the article. It is definitely a significant outside perception, and if it is simply mistaken then that should be emphasized.

In other words, I'd want the level of support that would let us treat these issues as being caused by misinformation rather than being legitimate criticism. I think that's unlikely given the sources we already have, but there could be individual instances that qualify. Or it could be that the issues are caused by a few fringe postmodernists who are generally rejected by the rest, in which case again that should be put in the article. I can definitely agree that certain authors never intended to say certain things (Latour comes to mind, from my comment at FTN), and I would gladly support the inclusion of content discussing that. However, I don't have the impression that this applies to the field as a whole. In addition, it's still important that people have (mis)interpreted them as saying those things regardless. Sunrise (talk) 09:43, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello, I'm a bit dismayed by Wiki's entry on 'postmodernism' - especially the early paragraphs. The several references to Encyclopaedia Britannica's brutally simplistic and misrepresentative entry on the subject rather paint the Wiki entry into an unfortunate corner. Time for a rewrite by scholars more steeped in the subject? 121.200.6.23 (talk) 04:30, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Vague expression of discontent is not helpful. What exactly is wrong with it? --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:40, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't actually think this article is accurate.

Post-modernism isn't a "stance" it's an area of discourse. Specifically an area of discourse that questions how meaning can be created, transformed, and destroyed. This is why an artist like Charles Krafft, or a website like 4chan is just as much postmodernism as Derrida is. So I think Wikipedia really has gotten this topic wrong by declaring it an ideological stance. That's like saying poetry is an ideological stance, or abstract expressionism is an ideology. Not really true. 194.223.13.28 (talk) 02:54, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

If you are so knowledgeable about the subject, it should not be a problem for you to find sources that express that idea. Without sources, we cannot do anything. --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:45, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Concur. Please go ahead and propose WP:RS that support this change. Unfortunately The Postmodern Condition doesn't mention 4chan. Simonm223 (talk) 12:12, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Section on "Origin of Term" Is Inaccurate

The statement that Chapman used the term "postmodern" in 1870 is unfounded. See Oxford English Dictionary for documented early uses of "postmodern" and related terms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.36.7.1 (talk) 03:19, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Intellectual vs. Anti-Intellectual

72.197.187.131 made the following two edits: [1] [2], changing the first line from:

Postmodernism is an intellectual...

to:

Postmodernism is an anti-intellectual...

I explained on the the editors' talk page that we require sources, and eventually the editor provided this as a source:

Kuntz, Marcel (2012-10-01). "The postmodern assault on science". EMBO Reports. 13 (10): 885–889. doi:10.1038/embor.2012.130. ISSN 1469-221X. PMC 3463968. PMID 22986553.

I know enough about Postmodernism to know that the above source is not representing Postmodernism correctly; however, I am not familiar with the WP:RS in this article. I am hoping someone else who is more familiar with topic and the sourcing can explain the issues with the above source and why it would not be sufficient to make such a drastic change to the WP:LEDE. I also don't know enough about the publication to know if that source is reliable.

My assumption is that the author Marcel Kuntz is not an expert in an appropriate field, e.g. Philosophy, Semiotics, Critical theory, Literary criticism or Postmodernism. His expertise is in biotech. GMO is mostly what the article is actually about. The author seems to have no familiarity with the major issues with Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy) that go back to the Ancient Greeks and probably before them. Although Nietzsche's work was the first thing we read in my Postmodernism class, anyone with knowledge of Ancient philosophy and Modern philosophy knows the problems of subjectivity, Metaphysics, and what can be known (Epistemology) with certainty. These issues have been with us a long time. Descartes pondered this. David Hume had a scathing attack on the use of inductive reasoning in Empiricism in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And Kant came up with a fantastic response in Critique of Pure Reason where he posits the Thing-in-itself. All this long before Nietzsche's scathing criticism of Western morality in works like On the Genealogy of Morality, which caused Analytical Philosophers like Bertrand Russell to attack him and his works. Based on my knowledge and the sources I have read, Kuntz does not seem to be familiar with any of this (or inexplicably omits it). What I also find so puzzling in Kuntz's writing is that he makes no mention of Uncertainty principle or the subjectivity inherent in the Theory of relativity. --David Tornheim (talk) 04:49, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Author goes on about deconstruction at length, fails to mention Derrida once. Simonm223 (talk) 17:21, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

flagging weak entry

This description of postmodernism is poor: relies too much on thin accounts of postmodernism. Why isn't Fredric Jameson cited? I always ck wikipedia when writing lectures as some students will get info here. This account is misleading and unclear. 2600:1700:6237:D400:1885:E491:ACAC:E8E8 (talk) 16:57, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Great suggestion for improvement. Do you have some proposed text to bring Jameson in? He's definitely an appropriate source. Simonm223 (talk) 17:02, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree that the article needs a lot of work, some of which I have been doing—at an admittedly plodding pace (see above). Jameson does appear in Criticism_of_postmodernism#Marxist_criticisms, but I agree he is important enough to merit mention as a critic in this article, perhaps also to be cited in a rewritten Definition(s) section. Left to my own devices, he probably will crop up somewhere. But if either of you have any specific language you want to see, please consider adding it yourself or sharing it here.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 17:16, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

This section from the start of his postmodernism book is a good place to start shaping something probably.

Thus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows then at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous

But it's rather too long to use as a quote. Simonm223 (talk) 17:26, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Later we have every position on postmodernism in culture— whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today. - which is an excellent turn of phrase. Simonm223 (talk) 17:28, 16 April 2024 (UTC)