Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism

"As for the "deconstruction" that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can't comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies --- of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren't, a possibility to which I'll return. "

This is the level of the writing. He don't understand deconstruction so he don't like it. That is what is wrong with most critique of postmodernism.

Further more it's not just french philosophers. Thomas Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyrabend are not exactly french.

All he do is showing how ignorant he is on what he speaks. But that do expalain the level of his other writing.

I doubt it's a transcript, since I think he implicitly mentions the writing process in several places. (The references to not giving full arguments.)

I try not to reply to these types of arguments, but two days in a row of dissing postmoderism is a bit much, and so I'll try to defend postmodernism, cause I do think it's worth defending.

The first problem with postmoderism is it exists across fields. There was a movement in architecture. There was a movement in theatre. If you listed all the fields, you'd notice that they're all creative. That's the other problem, and the one that creates so much confusion for non-creative people. I wouldn't say all scientifically minded (digital thinking) people are not creative, but I'd guess a majority probably aren't. It's those that have problems with it, and this is why people 'that get it' call them 'stupid'. I don't agree that they're stupid, but I do think it's to do with the lack of natural creativity.

From my interpretation, the thing about postmoderism is that it measures the field using what makes that field unique as the variable. Postmodern designers feared that 'creativity' in design was disappearing, as it was the 'creativity' that designers valued, so without it - there was no more design. The postmodern philosophers, who are mostly concerned with humans, came to the same conclusion - humans were disappearing. Without humans, there is no more philosophy.

You also have to remember that these are creative people asking the questions, and creative people cannot be tamed. They love a prank, and if they choose to write, their styles become poetic and humourous. They redefine words as that is what philosophy has been doing since the origins of it. A bunch of drunk greeks sitting around defining concepts like love. Hegel re-defined practically every stylistic word he could find - to be poetic. Philosophy may have branched out into fields like science, but its origins are in human creativity, and that can't be measured by rigorous scientific method. It's art for thinkers. It explores a world that 'does' exist, but science choses to ignore as it has no other option but to. Some people can't accept that, and in this modern culture with modern people on a postmodern trajectory, they lash out, which results in some ridiculous polemics against it.

The big point of postmodernism that needs to be understood is that it is the 'end' of something. The 'end' of design. The 'end' of humans. It doesn't mean those things will cease to exist, but that what made them worthy of our attention was going to 'end'. Tech fields haven't yet hit a point where new ideas stop coming, but there will come a time where the only things coming out are rehashes of twitter or myspace. That's when a genuine postmodernism movement will rise within technology.

The ultimate test of postmoderism is to hand a naturally creative human a book by Baudrillard, and see if they get it. I would guess at least half could interpret a bulk of it.

"I have heard people criticize universal grammar as being, essentially, a Colonialist theory, which attempts to assimilate languages into a Eurocentric framework."

What is the BS part then formulation or the theory?

I hear what you're saying, but I think it's wrong - language is imperfect, and may de facto exclude absolute truth, but it's the 'worse is better' of human communication :-)