the language of postmodernism

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

Metamodernism’s Construction

Metarealism is concerned with establishing the conditions and limitations of reality. In academia, when previously agreed-upon categories begin to crack under the pressure of cross-disciplinary interrogation, professors begin grasping for concepts of the ‘real’ like passengers grabbing life-vests on a sinking ship.

You know what's coming:

1] The Gap
2] Rummy's Rule

The Gap because there is just no getting around it: that grand canyon between what even the most intelligent among us think reality is and all that would need to be known about the existence of existence itself in order to actually know what it is.

Rummy in regard to to this part: "But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know" about reality itself."

The ship isn't sinking so much as far vaster than any of us can even begin to grapple with.

Postmodernism appears to have inherited a concept of ‘the real’ from modernism; that the real is that which is mind-independent. The typical postmodern response is to consider what was formerly ‘real’ as simply a ‘social construction’, that is, a product of the human mind, subject to the buffeting gales of culture and history. But Storm thinks this opposition between ‘the real’ and ‘products of the mind’ is misleading. By contrast, the metamodern response is to establish various ‘modes’ of the real, perhaps including contents of minds. Then the real becomes a possibility for those scholars who want to establish a contrast case. That is, the ‘real’ can be established as a contrasting case to that which is not real.

Let's bring this intellectual contraption down to Earth...

Trump and all those others indicted down in Georgia. Now, from a modern, postmodern or metamodern frame of mind, are there objective facts that everyone can agree on? Does the state of Georgis exist? Was there a presidential election in November of 2020? Does Donald Trump actually exist? Do all of the other men and women discussed in the news media in regard to the indictments exist? Are they real or are they just a product of particular minds?

Now moving on to the indictments...

Is there a 98-page indictment detailing all of the alleged criminal behaviors committed by Trump and others? Are there in fact newspaper articles discussing the case? Or is all of this just a product of minds as well?

Now on to the part that revolves more around our reactions to all of this. Reactions based largely on our uniquely personal political prejudices. Were the indictments justified? Let's run that by the talking heads at MSNBC and Fox. See if we can pin down the objective truth here too.

Let's face it, for many of the MAGA fanatics even if they believed Trump was guilty of everything that he is charge with, his behaviors would still be defended. Why? Because nothing that he does can be deemed wrong or immoral. Why Because nothing is more important in America right now than for the MAGA forces to drive the ungodly liberal Communists out and to take over the government...federal, state and local.

[Consul]

A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus

The Enlightenment and Its Discontents

The book’s problems begin on the very first page, with Hicks’ list of seminal postmodern authors. He includes obvious picks such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, three of Hicks’ four horsemen of postmodernity. But others—Richard Rorty and Jacques Lacan—have a debatable association with postmodernity and some of those included were even outright critics of postmodernism, such as the feminist legal scholar Catherine Mackinnon, author of “Points Against Postmodernism,” and Luce Irigaray, whose work is a frequent target of postmodern feminists due to its alleged essentialism.

"For our purpose of understanding postmodernism, Richard Rorty’s views are important because he is the leading American postmodernist."

Stephen Hicks: "Richard Rorty, "Solidarity or Objectivity?" and "The Contingency of Language." 2011: https://www.atlassociety.org/post/richa ... f-language

Richard Rorty called himself a "postmodern bourgeois liberal", but…

"That designation [“postmodern bourgeois liberal”] was supposed to be a joke. I thought it was a cute oxymoron—but no one else seemed to think it was funny."

(Rorty, Richard. "Toward a Postmetaphysical Culture." Interview by Michael O'Shea. 1995. In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 46-55. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. p. 52)

Well, is Rorty really a postmodernist? Of course, this question presupposes an answer to the question what postmodernism really is. What one can justifiedly say is that Rorty rejects the epistemological and ontological foundations of Enlightenment modernism without also rejecting its ethical and political aspects. So Rorty is a political modernist, but a philosophical postmodernist.

"Rorty’s pragmatist liberalism is a different type of liberalism; it is an entanglement of romanticism and the Enlightenment. It is romantic because the imagination allows us to redescribe the world and the self in a new light that helps us to cope with life’s problems, limitations, and challenges and to see the effects of our indifference toward others. It is a product of the Enlightenment because it is, in Westbrook’s words, “Enlightenment politics without Enlightenment philosophy” (155). Rorty discards the philosophical project “to fnd a new, comprehensive, worldview which would replace God with Nature and Reason”, while he embraces the political project of creating “a heaven on earth; a world without caste, class, or cruelty” (Rorty 2001, 19). In this regard, Tan argues that, “Unlike other postmodernists whose rejection of the Enlightenment project turns them against liberalism, Rorty is a postmodern liberal who subscribes to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality” (Tan 2009, 161). At the same time, Rorty rejects the Enlightenment’s ontological and epistemological commitments, because liberalism does not need such a foundation. He defends “the institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies without using … [the traditional Kantian] buttresses”, that is, without appeal to “‘rationality’ and morality as transcultural and ahistorical” (Rorty 1991a, 198). And it is just the rejection of the Enlightenment’s ontological and epistemological commitments that “makes his bourgeois liberalism, postmodernist bourgeois liberalism” (Westbrook 2005, 155)."

(Marchetti, Giancarlo. "The Philosophy of Richard Rorty." In The Ethics, Epistemology, and Politics of Richard Rorty, edited by Giancarlo Marchetti, 1-26. New York: Routledge, 2022. pp. 19-20)
———
"Richard Rorty distinguishes between two Enlightenment projects, one philosophical and one political. He rejects the philosophical project, “to find a new, comprehensive worldview which would replace God with Nature and Reason,” but, in his own way, embraces the political project, “to create heaven on earth: a world without caste, class, or cruelty” (Rorty 2001, 19). Unlike other postmodernists whose rejection of the Enlightenment project turns them against liberalism, Rorty is a postmodern liberal who subscribes to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality but discards their metaphysical grounding in representationalist truth claims about universal and ahistorical human nature and reality. He defends “the institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies,” the United States especially, without the “traditional Kantian buttresses” in the form of universalistic notions of reason, morality, or human nature (Rorty 1991, 198). He denies that liberalism needs any such foundation. All it requires is the contingent consensus among liberals about certain beliefs, desires, and emotions that distinguish them and with which they construct their self-image as liberals (Rorty 1991, 200). In this, liberalism is neither worse nor better than other “isms” people identify themselves with—no noncircular justifications are available for the constituents of our identities.

Unlike Enlightenment liberals who make sense of their moral and political convictions by describing them “as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality,” Rorty describes his liberal convictions by “telling a story of their contribution to a community” (Rorty 1991, 21). Community is therefore central to Rorty’s liberalism. A liberal community is a “classless and casteless utopia,” “whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices” (Rorty 1989, 60). Liberal morality is a set of practices developed over time through the agreement of members of the community about what is most conducive to the flourishing of their community consonant with their self-image. Public life is not governed by absolute truth, understood as correspondence to a nonhuman reality, or some infallible scientific (or philosophical) method. Ideal interactions are free and open encounters wherein it is accepted that “in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes” (Rorty 1989, 52). As far as possible, political decisions and collective actions should be the outcome of such encounters, accommodating as many different interests as possible, with maximum room for private choices, and implemented with minimum force.

The liberal community in Rorty’s stories is neither the culmination of Nature’s design nor the embodiment of universal reason; it is the contingent product of historical “experiments in living” (Rorty 1989, 45). Human solidarity is not due to “something within each of us—our essential humanity—which resonates to the presence of this same thing in other human beings” (Rorty 1989, 189). One’s sense of solidarity that governs actions tends to be circumscribed by some group smaller than the human race, a group one identifies with to the extent that its boundaries divide others into “us” and “them” (Rorty 1989, 190–91). Rorty believes that human beings are inevitably ethnocentric."

(Tan, Sor-Hoon. "A Confucian Response to Rorty’s Postmodern Bourgeois Liberal Idea of Community." In Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, edited by Yong Huang, 161-179. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009. pp. 161-2)

However, owing to its vagueness, Rorty wasn't happy with the term "postmodernism". A more precise term for Rorty's sort of postmodern philosophy is "neopragmatism".

"I am not fond of the term “postmodernism”[.]"

(Rorty, Richard. "Feminism and Pragmatism." 1991. Reprinted in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3, 202-227. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. p. 210n18)
———
"I've never known what the term 'postmodern' means."

(Rorty, Richard. In: Richard Rorty & John Searle. "Rorty v. Searle, At Last: A Debate." Logos 2/3 (1999): 20–67. p. 46)
———
"The word 'postmodernism' has been rendered almost meaningless by being used to mean so many different things. If you read a random dozen out of the thousands of books whose titles contain the word 'postmodern', you will encounter at least half a dozen widely differing definitions of that adjective. I have often urged that we would be better off without it – that the word is simply too fuzzy to convey anything."

(Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999. p. 262)
———
"I cannot find any good use for the term postmodernism. Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition did not succeed in giving the term a useful sense, nor have later attempts. If one reads ten books with postmodern in the title one will emerge with at least five or six different meanings for that flexible term. I would prefer to talk about Foucault, Derrida, and the rest individually, rather than trying to lump them together as representatives of something called postmodern philosophy. I have no idea what is supposed to make a painting, or a novel, or a political attitude, "postmodern"."

(Rorty, Richard. "On Philosophy and Politics." Interview by Chronis Polychroniou. In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 89-103. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. p. 95)
———
"Heidegger and Derrida are often referred to as "postmodern" philosophers. I have sometimes used "postmodern" myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as "distrust of metanarratives." But I now wish that I had not. The term has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth. I have given up on the attempt to find something common to Michael Graves's buildings, Pynchon's and Rushdie's novels, Ashberry's poems, various sorts of popular music, and the writings of Heidegger and Derrida. I have become more hesitant about attempts to periodize culture—to describe every part of a culture as suddenly swerving off in the same new direction at approximately the same time. Dramatic narratives may well be, as MacIntyre has suggested, essential to the writing of intellectual history. But it seems safer and more useful to periodize and dramatize each discipline or genre separately, rather than trying to think of them all as swept up together in massive sea changes."

(Rorty, Richard. Introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, 1-6. New York: Cambridge University, 1991. p. 1)

"neo-pragmatism: A postmodern version of pragmatism developed by the American philosopher Richard Rorty and drawing inspiration from authors such as Dewey, Heidegger, Sellars, Quine, and Derrida. It repudiates the notion of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and the notion of epistemic objectivity. It is a nominalist approach that denies that natural kinds and linguistic entities have substantive ontological implications. While traditional pragmatism focuses on experience, Rorty centers on language. Language is contingent on use, and meaning is produced by using words in familiar manners. The self is seen as a “centerless web of beliefs and desires,” and Rorty denies that the subject-matter of the human sciences can be studied in the same ways as we study the subject-matter of the natural sciences. Neo-pragmatism, which focuses on social practice and political experimentation, claims that there is no objective and transcendental standpoint from which to pass judgment and that truth must be relative to specific social contexts and practices.
—
“The senses in which the new pragmatism differs from the old are, first, with regard to the shift from experience to language and, second, with regard to an acquired suspicion of ‘scientific method’ deriving from the historicizing of science in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn and P. F. Feyerabend.” D. Hall, Richard Rorty"

(Bunnin, Nicholas, and Jiyuan Yu. The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. p. 467)

[Consul]

A Review of Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
Matt McManus

The Enlightenment and Its Discontents

The book’s problems begin on the very first page, with Hicks’ list of seminal postmodern authors. …

Here's another list by sociology professor Simon Susen:

"Who Are These ‘Postmodernists’?
The list of scholars whose works are – directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, rightly or wrongly – associated with the rise of postmodern thought is long. In alphabetical order, we may mention the following scholars who – in many cases, contrary to their will, or, in some cases, posthumously and, hence, without their knowledge – appear to have played a noticeable role in the construction and development of postmodern thought:

Perry Anderson (1938–), Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), Zygmunt Bauman (1925–), Steven Best (1955–), Judith Butler (1956–), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Mike Featherstone (1946–), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Francis Fukuyama (1952–), Félix Guattari (1930–92), Donna J. Haraway (1944–), Sandra Harding (1935–), Nancy Hartsock (1943–2015), David Harvey (1935–), Ihab H. Hassan (1925–), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Ágnes Heller (1929–), Linda Hutcheon (1947–), Andreas Huyssen (1942–), Luce Irigaray (1932–), Fredric Jameson (1934–), Keith Jenkins (1943–), Douglas Kellner (1943–), Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014), Scott Lash (1945–), Bruno Latour (1947–), David Lyon (1948–), Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), Michel Maffesoli (1944–), Doreen Massey (1944–), Chantal Mouffe (1943–), Linda J. Nicholson (1947–), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Richard Rorty (1931–2007), Steven Seidman (1948–), Hugh J. Silverman (1945–), Edward Soja (1940–), Keith Tester (1960–), John Urry (1946–), Gianni Vattimo (1936–), Robert Venturi (1925–), Wolfgang Welsch (1946–), Ludwig Wittgenstein (i.e. the later Wittgenstein) (1889–1951), Iris Marion Young (1949–2006), and Slavoj Žižek (1949–).

Of course, the above list is necessarily selective and, thus, not exhaustive."

(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 22-3)
———
"One can classify the scholars whose works are associated with the ‘postmodern turn’ in terms of their discursive positioning. (a) Posthumous and unwitting participants are those scholars whose works began to be linked to postmodern thought long after their death. (b) Reluctant and non-proselytizing participants are those thinkers who do not explicitly identify with the label ‘postmodern’, or – in some cases – even reject it, but whose works are nevertheless associated with this term. (c) Moderate sympathizers are those theorists who, while they do not necessarily proclaim the advent of postmodernity or of the ‘postmodern turn’, endorse the postmodern project, no matter how vaguely defined. (d) Enthusiastic supporters and contributors are those who explicitly advocate, and actively participate in, the creation of a postmodern paradigm and the construction of a postmodern society. According to this categorization, it is possible to classify the scholars whose works are associated with the ‘postmodern turn’ as follows:

* posthumous and unwitting participants (e.g. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein);
* reluctant and non-proselytizing participants (e.g. Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Fukuyama, Guattari, Harvey, Heller, Irigaray, Jameson, Laclau, Latour, Massey, Mouffe, Rorty, Urry, Young);
* moderate sympathizers (e.g. Anderson, Baudrillard, Bauman, Best, Haraway, Harding, Hartsock, Hutcheon, Huyssen, Kellner, Lash, Lyon, Maffesoli, Tester, Vattimo, Venturi, Welsch, Žižek);
* enthusiastic supporters and contributors (e.g. Featherstone, Hassan, Lyotard, Jenkins, Lyotard, Nicholson, Seidman, Silverman, Soja).

What is noticeable when considering the above classification is the following: although there are only a handful of posthumous and unwitting participants, given that they are widely regarded as ‘classical figures’ of Western intellectual thought, their works are of canonical significance to the postmodern project. Furthermore, the vast majority of thinkers whose writings are linked to the ‘postmodern turn’ can be described either as reluctant and non-proselytizing participants or as moderate sympathizers. Ironically, then, the principal intellectual figures whose names are associated with postmodern thought do not unambiguously identify with this label. Critics may legitimately argue that, in this light, the ‘postmodern turn’ is a project that lacks explicit, strong, and widespread support among those who are considered to be key representatives of its intellectual spirit. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that self-declared, open, and whole-hearted supporters of the ‘postmodern turn’ represent a clear minority."

(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 26-7)
———
"More controversially, one can classify – and, indeed, rank – the scholars whose works are associated with the ‘postmodern turn’ in terms of their intellectual influence:

* highly influential (established ‘classics’, ‘paradigm inventors’, and ‘game changers’) (e.g. Foucault, Heidegger, Nietzsche, later Wittgenstein);
* very influential (very prominent contemporary scholars) (e.g. Anderson, Baudrillard, Bauman, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Fukuyama, Guattari, Jameson, Laclau, Latour, Lyotard, Maffesoli, Mouffe, Rorty, Žižek);
* influential (prominent contemporary scholars) (e.g. Best, Featherstone, Haraway, Harding, Hartsock, Harvey, Hassan, Heller, Hutcheon, Huyssen, Irigaray, Jenkins, Kellner, Lash, Lyon, Massey, Nicholson, Seidman, Silverman, Soja, Tester, Urry, Vattimo, Venturi, Welsch, Young).

Surely, league tables aimed at capturing the impact of particular scholars in academic fields and subfields are not only contentious and relatively arbitrary, but also potentially dangerous and counterproductive. If we are willing to accept, however, that – for the right or the wrong reasons – some intellectual figures are, overall, more influential than others, then we are confronted with a striking phenomenon when examining the wider significance of scholars whose works are associated with postmodern thought: only some of them may be characterized as ‘pioneering’ early modern or modern thinkers; quite a few of them may be conceived of as ‘pioneering’ late modern or postmodern thinkers; yet, a noticeably large proportion of postmodern advocates and sympathizers can be classified as influential ‘commentators’ and ‘recyclers’, rather than as ‘paradigm inventors’, within contemporary intellectual disputes."

(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. p. 31)
———
"One can classify the scholars whose works are associated with the ‘postmodern turn’ in terms of their oppositional attitude(s):

* the critique of anthropocentrism (e.g. Best, Foucault, Latour, Lyotard);
* the critique of binaries (e.g. Butler, Foucault, Haraway, Hartsock, Irigaray, Latour, Nicholson, Rorty, Young);
* the critique of (and a certain fascination with) consumer capitalism (e.g. Best, Featherstone, Harvey, Jameson, Kellner, Lash, Tester, Urry);
* the critique of disciplinary power and surveillance (e.g. Foucault, Lyon);
* the critique of essentialism (e.g. Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Guattari, Haraway, Harding, Hartsock, Irigaray, Mouffe, Nietzsche, Seidman, Young);
* the critique of foundationalism (e.g. Butler, Foucault, Latour, Nietzsche, Rorty, Seidman, Silverman, Young, Žižek);
* the critique of heteronormativity (e.g. Butler, Foucault, Haraway, Harding, Hartsock, Irigaray, Nicholson, Seidman, Young);
* the critique of logocentrism and representationalism (e.g. Derrida, later Wittgenstein);
* the critique of metanarratives (e.g. Lyotard, Seidman);
* the critique of metaphysics (e.g. Heidegger);
* the critique of modern reason (e.g. Foucault, Guattari, Heidegger, Lyotard, Nietzsche, Rorty, Seidman, Silverman);
* the critique of modernity (e.g. Bauman, Foucault, Hassan, Heidegger, Hutcheon, Huyssen, Lyotard, Maffesoli, Seidman, Tester, Vattimo, Venturi, Welsch, Žižek);
* the critique of orthodox Marxism (e.g. Anderson, Deleuze, Foucault, Fukuyama, Guattari, Harvey, Heller, Jameson, Kellner, Laclau, Lash, Lyotard, Massey, Mouffe);
* the critique of traditional notions of sociality (e.g. Maffesoli, Seidman);
* the critique of teleologism (e.g. Foucault, Fukuyama, Jenkins, Laclau, Lyotard, Mouffe, Nietzsche, Seidman, Silverman, Welsch);
* the critique of the instrumental organization of space (e.g. Harvey, Massey, Soja, Venturi).
* the critique of the political economy of the sign (e.g. Baudrillard);
* the critique of the subject (e.g. Foucault, Heidegger, Laclau, Latour, Lyotard, Mouffe, Nietzsche, Rorty, Seidman, Silverman, Žižek).

As illustrated in the above list, the cultivation of an eclectically minded ‘oppositional attitude’ is crucial to the ‘postmodern spirit’. In this sense, the postmodern endeavour is an attempt to break away from the canonical presuppositions of Enlightenment thought. While the opposition to orthodox Marxism is vital to the ‘postmodern spirit’, it is striking that most Francophone thinkers whose writings are brought into connection with the postmodern project come – both politically and intellectually – from a Marxist tradition and are, as a result, often described as ‘post-Marxists’. Of course, as demonstrated above, the subversive nature of postmodern thought has many facets. Its opposition to the grand narrative of ‘scientific socialism’, however, is particularly important for the following reason: it indicates that the crisis of Marxism and the rise of postmodernism, in the early 1990s, historically coincide."

(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 27-8)

[iambiguous]

Richard Rorty was an ironist:

"She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. "

I merely make a distinction between a vocabulary in the either/or world and a vocabulary in the is/ought world.

[Consul]

Richard Rorty was an ironist: …

His "ironism" sounds very postmodern.

"I use "ironist" to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires – someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance."

(Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. xv)

"I shall define an "ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one's way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.

I call people of this sort "ironists" because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called "meta-stable": never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves. Such people take naturally to the line of thought developed in the first two chapters of this book. If they are also liberals – people for whom (to use Judith Shklar's definition) "cruelty is the worst thing they do" – they will take naturally to the views offered in the third chapter.

The opposite of irony is common sense. For that is the watchword of those who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated. To be commonsensical is to take for granted that statements formulated in that final vocabulary suffice to describe and judge the beliefs, actions and lives of those who employ alternative final vocabularies.
…
When common sense is challenged, its adherents respond at first by generalizing and making explicit the rules of the language game they are accustomed to play (as some of the Greek Sophists did, and as Aristotle did in his ethical writings). But if no platitude formulated in the old vocabulary suffices to meet an argumentative challenge, the need to reply produces a willingness to go beyond platitudes. At that point, conversation may go Socratic. The question "What is x?" is now asked in such a way that it cannot be answered simply by producing paradigm cases of x-hood. So one may demand a definition, an essence.

To make such Socratic demands is not yet, of course, to become an ironist in the sense in which I am using this term. It is only to become a "metaphysician," in a sense of that term which I am adapting from Heidegger. In this sense, the metaphysician is someone who takes the question "What is the intrinsic nature of (e.g., justice, science, knowledge, Being, faith, morality, philosophy)?" at face value. He assumes that the presence of a term in his own final vocabulary ensures that it refers to something which has a real essence. The metaphysician is still attached to common sense, in that he does not question the platitudes which encapsulate the use of a given final vocabulary, and in particular the platitude which says there is a single permanent reality to be found behind the many temporary appearances. He does not redescribe but, rather, analyzes old descriptions with the help of other old descriptions.

The ironist, by contrast, is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence. So she thinks that the occurrence of a term like "just" or "scientific" or "rational" in the final vocabulary of the day is no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice or science or rationality will take one much beyond the language games of one's time. The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness. So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness by constantly using terms like "Weltanschauung," "perspective," "dialectic," "conceptual framework," "historical epoch," "language game," "redescription," "vocabulary," and "irony.""

(Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 73-5)

[iambiguous]

Richard Rorty was an ironist: …

His "ironism" sounds very postmodern.

We'll need a context then.

A context revolving around conflicting moral philosophies, say.

One pertaining to abortion, or gun control, or homosexuality, or capital punishment, or animal rights or drug policy.

We can examine vocabulary from the perspective of modernism, postmodernism and metamoderism.

Words that mean the same for all of us objectively in the either/or word and words that connote subjectively for each of us as individuals in the is/ought world.

[Consul]

[Rorty's] "ironism" sounds very postmodern.

We'll need a context then.

Here is the context of Rorty's ironism ("as the recognition of contingency" – Rorty):

"Main features of the (neo-)pragmatist dimension:

* anti-representationalist critique of the notions of "mind" and "language" as vehicles of representation

* farewell to traditional (linguistic) philosophy as an inconsistent entanglement of representationalism, essentialism and foundationalism

* language as a tool – radical linguistic pragmatism with the instrumentalist general motto "use instead of mirroring"

* "just a species doing its best" – naturalistic neopragmatism as a consistent acknowledgement of Darwinism

* embedding instrumentalism in a communitarian language-game pragmatism: holism and pluralism of justification

* not a naturalization, but a socialization of epistemology with a philosophy of conversation: focus on the practice of justification

* transformative aspiration: not only critique of correspondence theory and linguistic-pragmatistic reconstruction of the concept of truth, but abandonment of truth theory: justification instead of truth"

(Müller, Martin. Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2022. p. 7)

[Consul]

Here's yet another list of (allegedly) postmodern thinkers, which includes not only philosophers but also artists such as Paul Auster, Philip Glass, David Lynch, Steve Reich, Cindy Sherman, and Quentin Tarantino(?).

"1 Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69)
2 Paul Auster (b. 1947)
3 John Barth (b. 1930)
4 Roland Barthes (1915–80)
5 Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)
6 Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925)
7 Daniel Bell (1919–2011)
8 Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949)
9 Nicolas Bourriaud (b. 1965)
10 Judith Butler (b. 1956)
11 John D. Caputo (b. 1940)
12 Hélène Cixous (b. 1937)
13 Guy Debord (1931–94)
14 Gilles Deleuze (1925–95)
15 Félix Guattari (1930–92)
16 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)
17 Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
18 Paul K. Feyerabend (1924–94)
19 Michel Foucault (1926–84)
20 Clifford Geertz (1926–2006)
21 Kenneth J. Gergen (b. 1935)
22 William Gibson (b. 1948)
23 Philip Glass (b. 1937)
24 Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1937)
25 Peter Halley (b. 1953)
26 Donna J. Haraway (b. 1944)
27 David Harvey (b. 1935)
28 Linda Hutcheon (b. 1947)
29 Luce Irigaray (b. 1930)
30 Fredric Jameson (b. 1934)
31 Charles Jencks (b. 1939)
32 Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944)
33 Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–96)
34 Ernesto Laclau (b. 1935)
35 Chantal Mouffe (b. 1943)
36 David Lynch (b. 1946)
37 Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98)
38 Brian McHale (b. 1954)
39 Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010)
40 Steve Reich (b. 1936)
41 Richard Rorty (1931–2007)
42 Edward W. Said (1935–2003)
43 Cindy Sherman (b. 1954)
44 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1941)
45 Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963)
46 René Thom (1923–2002)
47 Robert Venturi (b. 1925)
48 Graham Ward (b. 1955)
49 Hayden White (b. 1928)
50 Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949)"

(Sim, Stuart. Fifty Key Postmodern Thinkers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. pp. vi-vii)

[Consul]

Well, is Rorty really a postmodernist? Of course, this question presupposes an answer to the question what postmodernism really is.

"Far from constituting a coherent ideological tradition or clearly definable school of thought, ‘postmodernism’ has been shaped by an eclectic and heterogeneous intellectual movement, whose supporters share one significant characteristic: namely, radical scepticism towards beliefs and principles associated with the project of modernity in general and with Enlightenment thought in particular. What advocates of ‘postmodernism’ also have in common, however, is that – paradoxically – they are intellectually and socially attached to the historical horizon from which they seek to detach themselves: the condition of modernity. It is not the existence of ‘the postmodern’ that has given rise to the notion of ‘the modern’; rather, it is the existence of ‘the modern’ that precedes the rise of the idea of ‘the postmodern’."

(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. p. 21)

[iambiguous]

[Rorty's] "ironism" sounds very postmodern.

We'll need a context then.

Here is the context of Rorty's ironism ("as the recognition of contingency" – Rorty):

"Main features of the (neo-)pragmatist dimension:

* anti-representationalist critique of the notions of "mind" and "language" as vehicles of representation

* farewell to traditional (linguistic) philosophy as an inconsistent entanglement of representationalism, essentialism and foundationalism

* language as a tool – radical linguistic pragmatism with the instrumentalist general motto "use instead of mirroring"

* "just a species doing its best" – naturalistic neopragmatism as a consistent acknowledgement of Darwinism

* embedding instrumentalism in a communitarian language-game pragmatism: holism and pluralism of justification

* not a naturalization, but a socialization of epistemology with a philosophy of conversation: focus on the practice of justification

* transformative aspiration: not only critique of correspondence theory and linguistic-pragmatistic reconstruction of the concept of truth, but abandonment of truth theory: justification instead of truth"

(Müller, Martin. Richard Rorty: A Short Introduction. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2022. p. 7)

We'll need a context then.

A context revolving around conflicting moral philosophies, say.

One pertaining to abortion, or gun control, or homosexuality, or capital punishment, or animal rights or drug policy.

We can examine vocabulary from the perspective of modernism, postmodernism and metamoderism.

Words that mean the same for all of us objectively in the either/or word and words that connote subjectively for each of us as individuals in the is/ought world.

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

In the book’s second part Storm explains what he calls ‘Process Social Ontology’. Social ontology is concerned with the reality of social groups, especially in their apparent ability to act with agency in the creation of concepts which are sometimes external to them, such as the concept ‘money’, and sometimes internally self-referential, such as ‘gender’.

Social ontology?

Or, instead, are social interactions about as far removed from ontology as they are from teleology? In other words, money and gender given what particular historical and cultural context? Is there a way [philosophically or otherwise...modern, postmodern, metamodern or otherwise] to encompass how all rational men and women are obligated to think about them, feel about them? Embrace them in their social interactions with others?

And then, given a particular set of circumstances in which modern, postmodern and metamodern proponents might come into conflict, what on Earth does this...

One of social ontology’s goals is determining which, if any, of these concepts are really ‘natural kinds’ – types of things obviously definable in terms of static and unchangeable properties. However, such a search may lead to thinking of natural kinds as possessing an essence. Thinking in terms of essences enables one to generalize from one member of a natural kind to all of its members. This is in fact one of the tenets of substance ontology.

...mean? Whose goals in regard to what situation? And what is able to be described as essentially true about it? As opposed to conflicting personal opinions.

On the other hand this...

Storm accepts the reality of social groups and their group agency, but rejects essentialism. Instead he turns his attention to process ontology – the idea that all that exists is dynamic and continuously changing.

...seems entirely reasonable to me. Only in order to make it clearer we would need to take it out into the world of actual human interactions. Why in regard to any particular moral conflict are or are not essential, objective, universal value judgments beyond the reach of modernists, postmodernists and metamodernists.

And, given a No God world, it is my own rooted existentially in dasein personal opinion that they are.

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

Reconstructing Knowledge

What is the nature of the knowledge that a scientist might create?

Okay, but when scientists grapple with reconfiguring theory into practice, they are generally grappling with it within the parameters of the either/or world. So, through experimentation [re the scientific method], verification and falsification are often considerably more applicable when it comes to figuring out what is in fact true. In fact, true for all of us. That's why I suspect there are not a whole lot of postmodernists and metamodernists in the scientific community. Other than when science goes all the way out to the very end of the metaphysical branch in grappling with the Big Questions.

Knowledge, or specifically our confidence in our ability to create and use it, was perhaps the chief casualty when the linguistic turn arose in Anglophone philosophy. In Part III, ‘Hylosemiotics’ (really one chapter, but the longest in the book), Storm makes contact with the implications of the linguistic turn. Surprisingly, he does not repudiate it. Instead, he acknowledges the skepticism the linguistic turn raised about the gap between the world either as it is or as it might be, and human representation of the world.

Anglophone philosophy? Google it and you get this:

analytic philosophy n.
1. Any of various philosophical methodologies holding that clear and precise definition and argumentation are vital to productive philosophical inquiry.
2. A philosophical school of the 20th century predominant in the United States and Great Britain whose central concerns are the nature of logic, concepts, and language. Leading practitioners have included Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

So, in regard to postmodern and metamodern philosophy, how much of this is really applicable? From my frame of mind, the postmodern thinkers seem obsessed with the limitations of language. With deconstructing it. But for me, such limitations and deconstructions are applicable only in regard to moral and political value judgments. How is either school of thought pertinent to the laws of nature, to mathematics, to the physical world around us, to the rules of logic?

[iambiguous]

Modernism vs. Postmodernism
at The Living Philosophy website

Well into the 21st century, the trenches of the so-called culture war are drawn by the tension of Modernism vs Postmodernism. These two worldviews — as radically different as the Medieval and the Modern — still have much of an overlap.

Over and again, however, from my own frame of mind, we have to recognize first and foremost that any "radical differences" that there are here, they revolve almost entirely around human interactions in the is/ought world. Where is the equivalent in the either/or world? Postmodern physics or chemistry or mathematics or logic?

Up next: The postmodern weather report..."partly not partly sunny today, then shifting dramatically to partly not partly cloudy tonight. Or the postmodern analysis of the "big game" that day?

“Postmodernity definitely presents itself as Antimodernity. This statement describes an emotional current of our times which has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. It has placed on the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernity, even of posthistory." Jurgen Habermas, Modernity vs. Postmodernity (1981).

Ever and always, this revolves not as much around what different people believe when distinguishing modern from postmodern thinking, but what, given a particular set of circumstances, they can demonstrate in turn that all rational men and women are obligated to believe about it as well.

And how is this not almost always in regard to our moral and political and spiritual value judgments? The part where, in regard to everything from sexuality and education policy to matters of life and death itself, we deconstruct their dogmas and they deconstruct ours.

And no doubt about it...

Either in terms of ends or means, moral nihilism can beget amoral sociopaths. Or the equally amoral "show me the money" billionaires who run the world.

[Consul]

Social ontology?

Yes, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/

[iambiguous]

Modernism vs. Postmodernism
at The Living Philosophy website

Modernism

The word Modern is a nebulous term that has been used to refer to the contemporary day and age since the 6th century AD. But in the past few decades, a particular time period has come to be identified as Modernity.

Cue Woke Modernism? And all of the many adherents. Especially those at either end of the ideological spectrum...the extremists who are particularly fierce in equating being modern with being...civilized? enlightened?

The dates of this cultural phase vary with some calling everything after the Middle Ages Modernity; others divide the modern era into three phases:

Early Modernity: corresponding to the French Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution;
Classical Modernity: corresponding to the Long 19th Century; and
Late Modernity: which ended somewhere between 1968 and 1989.

Wherever one prefers to draw the line here, the bottom line of course is capitalism. Historically, it is a political economy that turned almost everything on its head. Me, myself and I, far more than we, small government far more than big government, Protestants far more than Catholics, wage slaves far more then literal bondage.

For our purposes here the exact dates do not matter because we’re not really talking about a historical period. Following Foucault’s analysis in his essay What is Enlightenment? we will be treating modernity more “as an attitude than as a period of history.”

For my purposes here, however, we'll still need a context. Given a set of circumstances most here will be familiar with, what behaviors would be deemed enlightened? Or civilized? Or modern? Then a postmodern/metamodern reaction to that. Then the part where the "serious philosophers" among us attempt to encompass the most technically sound assessment of those behaviors. In other words, in order to pin down at the very least the theoretically correct grasp of our moral obligations.

And this attitude is most salient in the period known as the Long 19th Century which spanned from the French Revolution in 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This was the time when Modernity had come into its fullness and was the dominant force in the culture.

Again, cue capitalism. And, in particular, the Industrial Revolution. Then crony capitalism and the Deep State. Then the part where the postmodernists among us started in on deconstructing everything.

Right. Tell that to those who own and operate the global economy.