The Evolution of Postmodern Thought | Helen Pluckrose

[Music] the social justice sounds like such a good idea who doesn't want social justice nobody says do you know what society really needs less justice whatever our politics are our ethics our philosophies our religions or lack of all of the above we generally all want to make the world a better place and yet we differ on how to achieve social justice and what it will look like these differences can be productive the conversations they engender between people with very different views helped us make our societies fairer and more accommodating of all kinds of people over the last 500 years and rapidly gaining in steam over the last 200 and particularly the last 50 we've set up secular liberal societies now I'm going to use the word liberal in this talk but because I know we've got a lot of Americans here I'm going to need to stress that I am using this in the general sense of freedom and openness and the opposite of a liberal so we're not talking about left-wing as it's sometimes used in America or right-wing as it's sometimes used in Australia but a an all-encompassing focus on individual liberty and the positive impact of the free exchange of ideas so over the last 500 years but really recently this has with the civil rights movements we've really sort of moved into a properly liberal age freedom of religion and freedom from religion equal opportunities for people regardless of gender race or sexuality science and reason have become the dominance or if not dominant at least the most respected way of establishing what is true and this has been used to make remarkable advances in medicine and technology the notion of the marketplace of ideas in which everybody could participate everything could be said and in principle ideas are evaluated on their merits and hammered out this is resulted in the most scientifically medically and technologically advanced societies humanity has ever known it's resulted in the most free and equal societies that have ever existed social justice has taken a leap forwards and yet there is a movement that presumptuously labels itself social justice as though it alone holds the key to this as though everybody else is actually seeking something different this movement is not conservative although it shares some values around segregation and purity with the far-right it's not liberal although it speaks a liberal language of diversity plurality and inclusion and it's not Marxist although it pays some lip service to anti capitalism social justice is a highly counterintuitive movement which speaks its own language and has its own conceptions of the world accordingly it is frequently misunderstood miscategorized and attempts to counter it frequently fail conceptions of social justice that are rooted in critical theory don't look much like the common understanding of social justice people see the symptoms of the social justice movement quite clearly they might refer to them as identity politics or political correctness call out culture or council culture it's been hard to miss the demands to decolonize everything from curricula to hairstyles and the tearing down of statues defacing of paintings pronouns have become a matter of paramount political importance they've also become much harder to navigate and use correctly and both their political sense and a grammatical one it's common now to hear that all men are sexist and all white people are racist if one protests at this one is told it's simply impossible not to be due to the system of socialization that we've all been through it seems that every day we hear news of a comedian being cancelled for a problematic joke or a celebrity offering a groveling apology for the unintended misuse of a word or that someone in the public eye has been found to have said something twenty years ago which is now considered racist sexist or homophobic artists of all kinds are frequently held up for criticism either because their work has not included a diverse range of people in which case there's a failure of representation or because it has in which case its cultural appropriation anyone who addresses political or cultural issues at all is likely to attract swarms of social justice activists to problematize call out to distort and misrepresent their arguments this is enabled largely by social media where activists can congregate and highlight the tweets or essays they have a problem with dock tiles are common and it seems not to matter whether one is a prominent person or a private individual sharing their own experience on their own Twitter account even when speaking on your own account you are likely to be accused of dictating to or speaking over marginalized people or you could just we could just go straight to white supremacist misogynist transphobic fascist or they it is becoming increasingly daunting particularly for those with businesses or jobs they'd like to keep to speak publicly at all the approach of the social justice activists is uncharitable unreasonable frequently uninformed unjust and unforgiving but what has caused this intense focus on identity knowledge language and the power structures that's what I'm here to talk about I'm going to look at where these ideas really coalesced and how they've developed over the last 50 years and what we see now the problem underlying social justice activism has a long history and in various different ways but we really saw it come together in the late 1960s 66 68 by 1970 certainly this was a time of great social change society was recovering from the world was Nazis and fascism genocide or communism and they were still mourning their dead Empire had fallen the Jim Crow had ended technology was advancing rapidly and a vibrant youth culture was forming ideologically liberal activism in the forms of the civil rights movements feminism and gay pride were in full flow at the same time as an angry and radical new left was mobilizing all in all the feeling at this time was one not only of change but of a radical break from what had gone before old certainties were being challenged certainty is about the advance of moral progress had been shaken by the wars a new recognition of the ways in which the rights of women racial minorities LGBT people had been denied was really being felt religion was declining pop music and mass-produced art which notions of what counts as culture there is a sense that things were moving too fast and becoming artificial and mass-produced this caused many intellectuals to write about the loss of authenticity this new era which was unfolding was understood to be as the era of post modernity the modern period is understood as one in which reality was simple graspable orderly and cohesive a satisfying story of steady progress and increased knowledge in the advance of human rights which could be told straightforwardly none of that seemed right anymore so the idea that an era of post modernity was beginning became a repeated refrain among leftist intelligentsia arguably the most profound influence on the academics was the loss of Marxism this framework had long formed the basis for leftist intellectual thought on how to make a better society now for many it had become untenable following the atrocities of the communist regime the main ground narrative for the left was in trouble many felt that Marxism like everything else was a simplistic parity which had failed this revolt resulted in despair that anything could be trusted anymore the bitter hopelessness and despair of meaning permeates the writings of the first post modernists this shift caused a great upheaval on the academic left traditionally the left distance has been comprised of two elements one was the Marxist or socialists which focused on material conditions economics and class it wanted to read revolutionize society to redistribute wealth the other is in liberalism which has focused on enabling the individual to access universal rights and opportunities liberalism seeks to reform society rather than revolutionize both Marxists and liberals are modernists that is they both believe in an objective reality and the importance of evidence and reason although they've come to different conclusions about where to go from there they both believe that a society in which everyone is able to thrive and put their skills to good use and be very naturally secure regardless of their class race gender or sexuality is a just society a society where some people are prohibited from this is an unjust society despite these shared aims Marxist and liberals have argued incessantly Marxists have accused liberals of being half measure sellouts who might as well be conservatives liberals have accused Marxists of being delusional utopians who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater these arguments have been acrimonious but they've also been productive in forming a functional left this was all to change with the arrival of post-modernism in the late 1960s there arose from all at once from different disciplines the intellectuals who'd come to be known as the post modernists some are best understood as commentators on the condition of post modernity that is they were observing the change and describing it the American Marxist Fredric Jameson deplored the shallowness of post modernity the lack of heart to anything the constant recycling and reputation repetition of art he diagnosed the nostalgia for anything real and said the individual had been lost Jean Baudrillard leaned heavily towards nihilistic despair and his book simulacra and simulation argued that society had entirely lost the real and was now just endlessly churning out copies of copies in the modern period he claimed everything began to be standardised and organized so uniqueness and authenticity were gone but in the postmodern period of mass production and technological simulation there is no original he said everything is now hyper real he called metaphorically for acts of bloody terrorism and claimed that death was the only thing that was real Geils Deleuze and felix qatari argued that people's drives were constrained by a capitalist consumerist society where the only thing that flowed was money they saw humans as coded in different times to different demands first family then despotic rulers then capitalism like Beaudry are they argued that modernity had standardized and systemized everything and that it needed to be dismantled for them it was not death that was the epitome of reality but human desires and they should be freed Deleuze ultimately committed suicide this then was largely some hopeless despairing yearning for anything authentic it had no realistically attainable goals these observations were almost impure ly descriptive however there were some French theorists whose ideas had purpose and they developed theories they are best understood as the post-structuralist and the constructionists and they went further in developing a theoretical practice in his groundbreaking book the postmodern condition condition Jean Francois Lyotard defined my post modernism as a skepticism towards meta-narratives by this he meant that all the large overarching stories we told ourselves about how society worked and the meaning of life were becoming less credible another description of meta-narratives are that there historically and his own cultural in that situated narratives which nevertheless are presented as universal Lyotard included Christianity and Marxism in his understanding of them meta-narratives but he also included science as his typical of post modernists his work focused intensely on the power of language he saw this in terms of different kinds of let of games which legitimated knowledge he claimed that the language of science was inseparable from the language of power and governments rather than the do these big metal narratives he argued will need lots of mini narratives rather than authoritative knowledge legitimized by scientific methods we need a per a legitimate that is we need multiple knowledge ease with none prized over any other this is moral and factual relativism so Jack Derrida the focus was even more intensely on language he was radically skeptical of the possibility of ever combining meaning by language for him words only referred to other words so meaning is indefinitely deferred house is understandable in relation to huts and mention Derrida also believed that words are used comparatively to give one term superiority to another that is men are defined as not being women and also is superior to women he appeared advocated ironically reversing these binaries to make them visible and challenge power hierarchies this can be benign enough and quite poignant I myself have been known to replace the world and his wife with the world and her husband but it can also go to quite a dark place if your conception of society is one in which women and racial and sexual minorities are constantly subjected to discrimination and abuse and then you want to reverse that binary you are likely to end up with sexism against men racism against white people and for this to be morally justifiable as a kind of redressing the balance this takes a step away from objectivity and towards subjectivity it also undermines the reasonable person standard upon which much law and judicial decision is based above all there was Michel Foucault of all the theorists his ideas have most ingrained themselves in our culture his key ideas echo both Lyotard skepticism of meta-narratives and Derrida's suspicion of the reliability of language to convey stable meaning the concepts of his which have best survived and have had been adapted over the last 50 years are Epis time power knowledge discourses and biopower in common usage knowledge is defined as an accurate understanding of an objective reality if we consider ourselves to know something rather than believe it suspect it hope it or think it probable we mean that we've been given sufficient reason to accept that it is true that it matches reality while cultural perceptions may vary and ideas may change over time something that is objectively true is true for everyone it could be discovered that something was thought to be true and actually it was false but this doesn't mean it was once true and then became false it means that a mistake was made and we are able to know this because of new evidence which shows it an example of this could be that the son was thought to have orbit the Earth but it was later discovered that the Earth orbits the Sun this was always the case and it doesn't depend on humans believing it this is a modernist understanding of knowledge and it was not how Michel Foucault understood it his understanding of knowledge was as a cultural construct that is we decide what is true and what is known through categories and narratives created and enforced culturally he referred to this as an epistemic a culturally devised system that provided the parameters for what could be considered true or false those in power set the Epis team there for what is understood by society as knowledge is really just an exercise of power it is power knowledge that's one word not two with a similar relationship the power knowledge is both constructed and perpetuated by ways of talking about things by discourses something becomes legitimized as knowledge by the way it is spoken about and it became becomes the way to speak about things chief among these legitimizing discourses is science Western societies largely accept the findings of science is the most substantiative sources of knowledge mr. Foucault was evidence that it was power knowledge he called this particular type of power knowledge bio power this is now a dominant idea in queer theory disability studies and fact studies these ideas continue to plague us today so it is worth taking the time to really try to get your head around them imagine that there is no objective truth humans are blank slates who get filled up with a story the powerful groups in society get to decide what that story is all the slates once written upon tell the same story but from a different perspective depending on where they are in relation to power so if the story includes the claim that men are dominant and women are submissive both men and we're we'll speak into this discourse but from a dominant or a submissive position the same goes for the claim that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality unnatural that white people are suited for some professional jobs black people for manual jobs the imperative then of postmodern approaches is to study the discourses of society to find the Fukien power knowledge invert the Guardian binaries and empower the lyotard e'en mini narratives this is now a plan this is the broad picture and it's not easy to grasp immediately so I will set up the essential ideas as a kind of list there is no way of obtaining objective truth everything is culturally constructed society is dominated by systems of power and privilege that people just accept as common sense these vary from culture to culture and subculture to subculture none of them is right or superior to any other the categories that we use to understand things like fact and fiction reason and emotion science and art and male and female are false they operate in the service of power need to be examined broken down and complicated language is immensely powerful and it is used to construct oppressive social realities therefore it must be regarded with suspicion and scrutinized to find the discourses of power the intention of the speaker is no more authoritative than the interpretation of the hearer the idea of the autonomous individual is a myth the individual is also a construct of culture programmed by his or her place in relation to power the idea of a universal human nature is also a myth it is constructed by what powerful forces deemed to be the right way to be therefore it is white Western masculine and heterosexual these are some core ideas of post-modernism which have survived in the academic world post-modernism is largely claimed to have died out but most of you will recognize these ideas in the social justice scholarship and the activism that we see today that's because they didn't die out they evolved not everyone believes that post-modernism has survived into the present they or that social justice is fundamentally a postmodern movement but it has and it is the first wave of post-modernism did die away by the middle of the 80s it was too intense and also aimless nihilistic really we can think of this as the high D constructive phase of post-modernism it was ironic and pessimistically playful and fairly hopeless it took everything to pieces but once they were in bits all over the floor there wasn't much more that could be done there was no confidence in the possibility of reconstructing because that would just produce new oppressive power structures however by the late 1980s a new generation of leftist academics had emerged and they were inclined to be neither so aimless nor pessimistic by this time the civil rights movements had begun to show diminishing returns within 20 years huge leap forwards in equality had been made ironically this was the same time the original post modernists were saying it was time to give up on the myth of progress but women had gained control over their reproduction equal pay laws had been passed similar legislation decriminalized discrimination on the grounds of race male homosexuality had been decriminalized with legal equality largely obtained what remained was suppressed attitudes to be addressed of course post-modernism was perfect for this or almost so just as the first wave of post modernists had merged all at once from different disciplines so did the next wave in the late 1980s post colonialism actually emerged little before that as an offshoot of post-modernism it was headed by the Foucault D and Edward Sayid who argued that the West had constructed the East as its inferior in order to construct itself in noble turns he said it was time for previously colonized peoples to reconstruct the East for themselves Gayatri Spivak and homi Bhabha followed in his footsteps although they were more dared Ian having adopted his despair of the ability of language to convey meaning they are largely incomprehensible however the aim to reconstruct had begun in 1989 over in critical legal studies and critical theory kimberlé crenshaw began developing her concept of intersectionality she described this as contemporary politics linked to postmodern theory the cultural constructivism of post-modernism Crenshaw felt was useful in regarding gender and race as cultural constructs but there had to be some objective reality if anyone was to achieve anything the existence of oppressive cultural constructs around gender and race were decided to be what was objectively real furthermore liberalism she claimed was inadequate despite the massive evidence that it was in fact very successful liberalism was too Universal to be politically productive and it was time for a more intense focus on identity politics in that same year Mary Pavan was attempting to reconcile deconstructive approaches with feminism like Crenshaw she argued that the methods were useful but they did need to be a recognition of an objective reality how can we advocate for women for equality for women unless women are a category of people that objectively exists she advocated a toolbox approach in which postmodern techniques would be Houston used when helpful and not when not meanwhile in expansion of gay and lesbian studies Judith Butler was claiming that actually women don't need to be a category of people that objectively exists in fact claiming categories to objectively exist is the problem queer theory was born it drew extensively on the work of Foucault and can be argued to be the purest form of post-modernism currently in existence however queer theory avoided the fate of deconstructing itself into oblivion by making the deconstruction of categories a form of activism queer theory reifies queerness and a whole range of queer identities but d constructs anything normative in this way it's felt people who don't fit within masculine man attracted to women or feminine women attracted to man don't don't feel the pressure to do so we can just deconstruct those categories all together just like that post-modernism had become energized and politically actionable we called this phase applied post-modernism no longer was it aimlessly pulling reality part and denying objective truth to exist it was now objectively true that social reality was culturally constructed by specific systems of power post-modernism now had goals it acknowledged and justified its departure from the original post modernists explicitly often claiming that they were privileged white men who had little need to affect change in the world this new form of post-modernism was much more user friendly consequently it could break the bounds of the Academy in the way the original post-modernism could not the dyeing radical left adopted it for this reason while much of post-colonial theory and queer theory array remained largely incomprehensible to the layman critical race theory and intersectional feminism was written in quiet clear language from the start this is probably due to its foundation in legal theory rather than philosophy thus activism for gender and racial equality it was able to draw on its ideas critical race theory is rooted in some very strong scholarship by liberal humanist and Marxist scholars which pointed out that white identity had been formed at the expense of black identity it is essential to note that critical race theory is originally an American phenomenon and the evidence that America was a racially divided society with blacks as second-class citizens until very recently is indisputable however with its recent descent into postmodern discourse analysis and conceptions of society is entirely under lane by systems of white supremacy operating in mysterious ways critical race Theory has become quite unhinged it threatens to undo much of the progress that has been made on racial equality using methods which assume racism to be present in any interaction between a white person and a person of racial minority results in always finding it and further entrenching the belief in an ever-present white supremacy things that have been listed as racist microaggressions include complementing a black person on their eloquence saying that you do not see people in terms of race or that you believe the best person for a job should get it this is clear what a minefield this is of course the people most affected by being trained to read everything in this way are racial minorities Gregory peon often Jonathan Hite described this entire method as a form of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy CBT teaches people not to catastrophize and not to reap negative meanings into everything this decreases anxiety and improves one's functioning in the world applied post-modernism trains people to do precisely the opposite it cannot help but increase anxiety and decrease ability to function Lukie on often height provide much evidence that that is what it what's happening a similar pattern has emerged within feminism where again everything is seen in terms of a sidon system of patriarchy which hides beneath a benign surface the job of the feminists is to detect it going through life in order to direct it detects ways in which men are belittling you is unlikely to lead to female empowerment teaching young women that society is hostile to them is probably not going to increase women's engagement with the public sphere one way in which the post modern understanding of hidden power structures works in society is to see everything in terms of a scale I'm sure some of you have seen some of those pictures of pyramids where at the bottom you've got asking a woman for coffee or complimenting her and at the top is rape and murder because this is understood as one big system of patriarchal rape culture the manifestations of it have last and becoming increasingly torturous this is largely to do with what's been happening in scholarship over the last thirty years since the initiation and diversification of various types of theory when a system of scholarship is closed to external critique as these theories generally have been and when evidence and reason are not required in the first place a body of work can quickly become quite deranged what has happened over the last thirty years is that concepts have been built upon concepts leading to a towering mountain of Theory none of which has ever born much relation to reality one scholar writes a paper arguing for the existence of white privilege peggy mcintosh she makes some good points but she claims that simply being white confers great benefits on an individual without any consideration of class or wealth issues this idea captures our critical race Theory spilled on it until it's well-established then another scholar Barbara Applebaum takes it a step further she argues that white privilege allows people to white people to sort of get away with with racism because they can absolve themselves of their privilege by acknowledging it so now we need another concept and to put on top of that which is white complicity in which white people can never absolve themselves of their responsibility for racism they are just implicit in it but if they didn't have existing so this idea is accepted and built upon then another scholar Robyn D'Angelo takes this a step further still white privilege and white complicity are still central concepts to her work but there's still a problem because some white people disagree with them we now need white fragility to close that gap white fragility is when white people respond to being told they're privileged and complicit in racism by doing one of three things disagreeing being quiet or going away that is the only way not to be fragile is stay right where you are and agree this new this this is not scholarship this is a casket trap there is simply no valid way to disagree with this conception of society to moderate it to qualify it to agree with some of it to point out problems you just have to agree it is also notable that Robin D'Angelo's language is so simple and clear that she could be read and understood by a ten-year-old she also speaks in terms of absolute certainty this has also happened over time in the other theories even in queer theory and post-colonial theory the kind of writing which was famously incomprehensible decades ago has become much clearer and much more sure of itself as the body of scholarship has grown and scholars have been able to point anyone who disagrees with them at a mounting body of work the fields confidence in their own right miss has grown whereas the first postmodernist spoke in terms of radical doubt and the applied postmodernists we retained some tentativeness and raised issues as questions to avoid making challengeable assertions the current scholars are absolutely convinced of the objective truth of their worldview this new phase of absolute certainty clarity and refusal to accept disagreement as anything other than a wish to deny privilege began around 10 years ago and has been rapidly escalating since 2015 those original ideas of the first post modernists are now sacred Creed's which cannot be doubted listen to these core tenets developed by a group of scholar activists including Robin D'Angelo it was read at the National race and pedagogy conference at the University of Puget Sound in 2015 racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms racism is an institutionalized multi-layered multi-level system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people and people as color as socially identified and disproportionately benefits White's all members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism albeit in various social locations remember our our slates with different versions of the story are all white people benefit from racism regardless of their intentions no one chose to be socialized into racism so no one is bad but no one is neutral so not act against racism is to support racism racism must be continually identified analyzed and challenged no one has ever done the question is not did racism take place but how did racism manifest in that situation the racial status quo is uncomfortable for most White's therefore anything that maintains white comfort is suspect the racially oppressed have a more intimate insight via experiential knowledge into the system of race than their racial oppressors but they're not bad however white professors will be seen as having more legitimacy thus positionality must be intentionally engaged means you must always mention your race gender and sexuality and how it impacts on what you're saying resistance is a predictable reaction to anti-racist education and must be explicitly and strategically addressed this is a Creed they said these are statements of absolute certainty and of objective knowledge therefore we call this stage rarefied post-modernism in one way this latest development is highly alarming it reads like a call to arms it's easily comprehensible to any idealistic young person who wants to fix the world and its presence is strongest in the Universities we're there to be found in another way this newfound clarity confidence and certainty is precisely what we need to have an effective push back we can get at these ideas now one doesn't have to have a PhD in the jargon to understand the claims and counter them for so long this kind of scholarship has been enabled to build because the vast majority of people did not know what it was talking about even liberals did not know what it was talking about liberal academics in other fields did not know what it was talking about the people pushing back at it have overwhelmingly been conservatives liberals mostly assumed that it was because it was in the service of social justice it must be a good thing and a liberal thing and if conservatives didn't like it it was probably both it's now becoming increasingly clear that it's not a good thing or a liberal thing liberals can now push back at it completely in keeping with their liberal principles in my talk this afternoon I'm going to suggest that we can do that by looking at the core tenets of social justice by acknowledging how much of it is good and how it's then going wrong how we can do it better thank you [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: New Discourses

Views: 204,729

Keywords: New Discourses, helen pluckrose, london, postmodernism, liberal club, robin diangelo, barbara applebaum, social justice, critical theory, liberalism

Id: xoi9omtAiNQ

Length: 34min 39sec (2079 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SteadfastAgroEcology]

Pluckrose is underrated. And perhaps the most well-informed critic of postmodernism in the IDW.

[u/2HBA1]

I found this very informative. Really traces the intellectual route that led from postmodernism to modern “social justice” ideology. Understanding the true nature of this ideology is greatly aided when you understand the ideas that lie at its root. As Pluckrose notes, an extremely opaque philosophical movement has given rise to an absolutist activist ideology. The ideology uses postmodernist invalidation of science, reason, free speech, and equal human rights to deny any possibility of error, question, or dissent.

[u/Atomskii]

Submission Statement:

Helen Pluckrose develops the definition of "Social Justice" as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the streets by describing how these ideas originated, evolved, and were built upon by successive generations of Theorists leading up to those who have become famous names even outside of the scholarly world today: for examples, Peggy McIntosh, Barbara Applebaum, and Robin DiAngelo. She wraps up by explaining how this newest generation of Theorists simplified the highly abstract ideas of their predecessors and made it far clearer and easier to understand so that it could, as we now see all around us, eventually go mainstream.

[u/maximumly]

She elucidated the evolution of postmodern thought here wonderfully. She was such a delight to listen to. Thank you!

[u/OneReportersOpinion]

Who reads post-modern thought outside of a university setting? It just doesn’t seem nearly as relevant as either side thinks it is.