Letters to the Editor
Paul Rosenberg
Published Letters: 994 Editor's Choice: 16
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On The Perils Of Postmodernism
[Read the article: David Halberstam on today's American press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since the topic has come up, it's worth noting that Robert Kegan's model of cognitive development--based primarily on Piaget and Kohlberg before him--provides a very clear explanation of postmodernism, including both its value and confusions.
Kegan explains the stages of cognitive development in terms of a process whereby the background of consciousness--what is subject--at one stage becomes the foreground of consciousness--object--at the next.
In traditional cultures, adulthood is characterized by stage 3, in which the self's subject is composed of the social structures and relationships in which it is embeded. This sort of self is constitutionally incapable of critiquing the society in which it lives, precisely because it cannot step outside itself.
Stage 4 corresponds with the modern, autonomous self of liberal political theory dating back to Locke, with earlier roots in the Renaissance. It takes social structures and relationships as object. From a conservative, stage 3 point of view, this is all terribly destructive. But as Kegan explains it, once the world became sufficiently complex, traditional structures simply couldn't cope with things. The need for stage 4 consciousness far preceeded its emergence in any large numbers. And the proper function of stage 4 is not to produce wanton disorder, disregarding all social rules, roles and conventions, but to take individual, personal responsibility for devising roles and rules that work, as opposed to simply accepting what has always been done before. A classic example of this is the emergence of blended families as the "traditional nuclear family" breaks down due to the same processes that stripped the nuclear family away from the larger extended family.
Similarly, stage 4 corresponds with the emergence of a post-modern self which takes the autonomous self, its ideology and its worldview as objects. A notable characteristic of stage 5 is that it sees opposites in symbiotic relationship with each other, and sees paradox as a source of insight. (Goedel's Incompleteness theorem, mentioned recently, derived from a variation on an ancient paradox, the Creatan who says "All Creatans are liars." Goedel's theorem is a form of postmodern knowledge.) As Kegan explains it, Stage 5 has two phases, a deconstructive phase, which questions and tears apart the constructs of stage 4, and a reconstructive phase, which sifts through the results amd uses what stands up to reconstruct a more coherent, more flexible higher-order order.
From this POV, one can readily see the problem with most "actually existing postmodernism," which is two-fold: First, it is stuck in the deconstructive phase, and never gets around to reconstruction. Second, more fundamentally, the consciousness of the people engaged in it does not match the sophistication of the project. Most of those doing work in postmodernism are not at stage 5, but rather are tossing around stage 5 concepts, but using them from a stage 4 point of view--or even, perhaps, stage 3.
Thus, it's a quite valid stage 5 project to question the validity and methods of science. And, indeed, by noting how science functions, we can gain significant insights into its strengths and weaknesses. But the process of questioning science in a postmodern way is itself not exempt from questioning--and this is a key point which postmodernists seem to have great difficulty coming to terms with. It explains quite well why the Social Text Affair caused such confusion in the postmodern community. Alan Sokal's "parody" was a brilliant way of calling postmodernism into question--which is not the same as discrediting it.
The problem was precisely that postmodernists were treating a mode of questioning as if it were a means of producing positive knowledge. This is, ironically, a form of fundamentalism, a characteristic of stage 3 consciousness encountering the complexity of a stage 4 or 5 world, and even regressing back to stage 2.
What postmodernism is very good at is questioning the certainty of science, not necessarily discrediting it. In the case of racialized social and biological science the questioning does lead to discrediting. But nothing of the sort is involved in "questioning" evolution or global warming. And, indeed, a postmodern examination of how postmodernism itself has been so used would be far more interesting--and genuinely postmodern--than the standard postmodern deconstruction of modernist science.
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Anoyone
[Read the article: David Halberstam on today's American press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]who chose to listen over the last four years KNEW that the Iraq War planned long before 9/11, that WMDs were a mere pretext, and that Iraq has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.
The press has reported all of these things long before the current attempt to withdraw from Iraq.
Care to comment, tiberius?
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jojo++
[Read the article: David Halberstam on today's American press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Recall the fear in the early twentieth century during Jack Johnson's career in boxing - that once one African-American was shown to be the physical and mental equal (or superior) to European-Americans, that race war would break out.
In the incredibly excellent book, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, author John Hoberman reminds us that until black athletes started emerging, it was taken for granted that physical and mental prowess went together hand-in-glove. But as soon as black athletes started to emerge, "common sense" quickly shifted to the opposite assumption--that physical and mental ability are antagonistic to one another, and that physical superioty is a sign of mental inferiority.
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Origins of Postmodernism
[Read the article: David Halberstam on today's American press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You make a good point, jojo++:
It's the only place they can be initially expressed - by those that are 1) outside the normal social networks 2) in things that don't appear to be primarily politically but 3) appear to be technically and economically important and 4) involve the basic principles of reality.
but I'd qualify it to say "It's the only place they can safely be initially expressed..." For, you see, Marx was quite clearly an early post-modernist thinker, as seen in the central role he assigns to the dialectic of opposites. And when Marx said, "I am not a Marxist," that was, in a way, a very post-modernist thing to do.
Of course, the Marxists who came after him quickly took care of that.
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Alan Watts
[Read the article: David Halberstam on today's American press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]was the "source" of all those good zen quotes. He was the original cover band.
Unless, of course, you read D.T. Suzuki.
Or Japanese.