Did Postmodernism lead to Post-Truth?

breepf said:
FWIW, I'm most familiar with talk of postmodernism in literature and film, where the go-to names are usually Lyotard and, of course, Jameson. (Note: these writers were, let us say, diagnosticians of postmodernism, and not necessarily its proponents).

Anyways, in literary & cinematic circles, to the extent that anyone even uses this term anymore, it's usually to demarcate the difference between texts that accept and/or acknowledge some 'reality'-text distinction (i.e. modernism) and those that don't (i.e. postmodernism).

To wit: modernism presumed to present a radically individualized experience of reality, but nowhere did it deny that there was some reality "out there" to be subjectivized; think Benjy Compson in Sound and the Fury. In that sense, modernism retains the realist project but romanticizes it.

The postmodern alternative, to the extent that such a thing exists, might include "Welcome to the Funhouse" by John Barth. For me, film provides a more straightforward answer: it's the difference between Blow-Up and The Draughtsman's Contract.
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Ha, I was going to mention Greenaway. Then I remembered, wait, who did the Draughtman's Contract . . . LOL.

I think Lyotard is the go-to on this question, and shows most clearly that post modernism and post truth are basically not alike. Lyotard's main thesis was that post-modernism was the wreckage left over (not his exact formulation) after the collapse of all the Grand Metanarratives. Religion didn't lead to salvation and in the face of science, collapsed into quackery (not all religion, but Scopes trial stuff). Capitalism didn't lead to progress. Communism didn't lead to utopia. Post modernism was the recognition that reality did not lend itself to such crude forms of mental organization.

One famous formulation of the difference between modernism and post-modernism (to me, best exemplified in the Crying Of Lot 49) is that modernists took people by the hand and led them to the edge of the abyss to look down. Post-modernists climbed the hill and had fun doing so; in the face of the abyss, they merely laugh.

But in any event, post-truth can't be post-modern because it is all about Grand Metanarratives. That's really what it's all about -- it's the attachment to half-assed metanarratives that can only be advanced through an obvious rejection of facts. We know the metanarratives that animate MAGA: illegal immigration and democrats are responsible for our woes. And their overarching belief in metanarratives reflects itself in the conspiracy mongering.

So postmodernism = rejection of metanarratives; post-truth = acceptance of pitiful metanarratives.
 
I think people sometimes give post-truth too much credit. Well, academics, because that's what academics do. You don't get a philosophy paper out of "fake news" without giving it a label and talking about it as an intellectual movement.

Post-truth is basically propaganda, with one innovation: it's choose-your-own-adventure propaganda. The totalitarian regimes, especially in "communist" countries, were founded on certain ideas that had been thought necessary to mobilize the population to throw off the shackles of the past. Bolshevism really did end the monarchy. Maoism really did fight the Japanese and then defeat the KMT on the strength of its populist appeal. These ideals provided the language for all propaganda, and thus the propagandists' job was essentially to peddle a certain narrative. It was top-down propaganda. It didn't matter if people liked "degenerate art"; it was anti-fascist or anti-communist and thus the authorities had to tell everyone how bad it was.

Post-truth -- as exemplified most by Fox News -- has no such conceptual moorings. It basically asks the audience which bullshit metanarrative it wants and then gives it to them. Remember: Trump is not even remotely the inventor of the never-ending stream of lies. The Bush administration was so famous for it that Colbert even gave it a nickname: truthiness. Remember Lyin' Paul Ryan, who just accidentally shaved an hour off his marathon time in multiple interviews and came up with economic plans featuring magic asterisks (* estimated projections, like the projection of unemployment at 2% by 2019).

But those efforts were still top-down; not quite as centralized as in authoritarian regimes, but it was still a dynamic of elites trying to convince the people of things that mattered to the elite. Trickle-down. Greeted as liberators. Makers and Takers, etc.

The "post-truth" innovation was evident in the GOP's post mortem in 2012. The leaders were saying, not in these words of course, that voters didn't buy their grand narratives, and that they would have to pivot to something more connected to experience. Trump said, bullshit -- you've just got to give the audience the metanarratives it wants. Which change, and that's why Trump's focus changes. It's why the closest he ever gets to a plan is concept-stage (and that is overly generous). The audience doesn't want to hear that shit. They want a metanarrative to blame someone else for their problems: immigrants, elites, China, so on and so forth.

In this sense, post-truth and post-modernism aren't much alike. For all its pastiche, post-modernism is still mostly author centered. The post-modern artist revels in his or her own cleverness. Tarantino is a quintessential post-modernist, especially early in his career. Think of the first scenes with Jules and Vincent. We expect them to be talking about tough gangster stuff. Instead they are talking about the metric system; TV pilots; foot massages; and their banter is almost Socratic. We see Vincent -- in his one intelligent moment in the film -- set up a trap for Jules: do you give foot massages? Well, would you give them to a guy.

Post-truth is audience centered. It's give the people what they want.
 
I should add that this critique of post-modernism is quite old. It was the animating force behind the famous Sokol controversy at Duke. And for a brief period of time, there was an effort by some totalitarian regimes, especially in Asia, to exploit the idea of contingent truths. Human rights, they would say, aren't universal. They represent European values of individualism, as opposed to Asian values of collectivity. Sokol was a socialist who preferred to work with the concrete -- literally, IIRC, because he would go to central America to help build houses for displaced populations. His reaction was basically, "how can we speak truth to power if we can't say what truth even is."

In my view, global warming quickly resolved that dilemma. To the extent that post-modernism ever denied truth or science -- and that accusation was always unfair and oversimplifying -- it couldn't any longer. Global warming was something that, in the 1990s, could only be observed through science and thus the organized skepticism had to yield.
 
breepf said:
Why not blame sophistry? Why not blame romanticism?
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The sophist school of philosophy was actually a thoughtful and well respected school of thought and practice in ancient Greece. Why it has come to take a negative connotation may say more about those who brought it to disparagement than about sophistry itself. Same with the Cynics and their school...
 
rodoheel said:
Is this really accurate? I mean at some level some things are objectively true or not. I was either born on a certain day, or I was not. I had a certain thing to eat for breakfast, or I did not. In a shooting war, someone always fired the first shot. Is the search for the truth about many things distorted and complicated by, among other things, people who are trying to spin the narrative for their own purposes and power? Absolutely. but that doesn't mean that "truth" doesn't exist.
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lowercase truth vs uppercase Truth
 
hedge said:
The sophist school of philosophy was actually a thoughtful and well respected school of thought and practice in ancient Greece. Why it has come to take a negative connotation may say more about those who brought it to disparagement than about sophistry itself. Same with the Cynics and their school...
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I think you took Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance too seriously.

Sophistry was self-consciously a rhetorical performance. That's how they described themselves. Protagoras said that his talent was to make the weaker argument look stronger.

Socratic dialogue was the antidote to rhetoric, in much the same way that cross-examination is the antidote to bullshit testimony.
 
Speaking of blaming sophistry, the Greeks kinda did that when they forced Socrates to drink hemlock for corrupting the youth of Athens...
 
rodoheel said:
I guess I may not be up enough on the philosophical side to understand the difference. Can you give a quick summary?
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lowercase truth: localized, empirical claims. It's raining today; grocery prices are rising; maybe even global warming is real
Uppercase Truth: History is the teleological unfolding of a dialectic between competing but incomplete states of being. Thus the culmination of history in the form of an enlightened monarch (Hegel), the communist utopia (Marx), or liberal rules-based international order (Fukuyama) is inevitable.

That's one example of Truth. Often Truth claims, unlike truth claims, are religious or quasi-religious in nature. Their function is to provide the rules by which truth claims are supposed to play. Hence you could say that the sky was blue in Renaissance Italy, but you could not say that the universe was chaos that solidified into order, like milk that turns to cheese, or that the worms in the cheese were angels.
 
superrific said:
lowercase truth: localized, empirical claims. It's raining today; grocery prices are rising; maybe even global warming is real
Uppercase Truth: History is the teleological unfolding of a dialectic between competing but incomplete states of being. Thus the culmination of history in the form of an enlightened monarch (Hegel), the communist utopia (Marx), or liberal rules-based international order (Fukuyama) is inevitable.

That's one example of Truth. Often Truth claims, unlike truth claims, are religious or quasi-religious in nature. Their function is to provide the rules by which truth claims are supposed to play. Hence you could say that the sky was blue in Renaissance Italy, but you could not say that the universe was chaos that solidified into order, like milk that turns to cheese, or that the worms in the cheese were angels.
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That makes sense. To go back to the subject of the thread, it does seem like philosophical debates about capital-T truth, when filtered down to people without the same intellectual or philosophical grounding, are easily distorted into "there is no such thing as lowercase-t truth" which can be manipulated to no end by people with bad-faith intentions. Hence [gestures broadly at everything].
 
rodoheel said:
That makes sense. To go back to the subject of the thread, it does seem like philosophical debates about capital-T truth, when filtered down to people without the same intellectual or philosophical grounding, are easily distorted into "there is no such thing as lowercase-t truth" which can be manipulated to no end by people with bad-faith intentions. Hence [gestures broadly at everything].
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I suppose that's plausible, but I don't think that's the actual intellectual history. For one thing, most people who would be willing to distort post-modernism's radical skepticism into they're eating the cats and dogs haven't ever been actually exposed to post-modernism.

Stephen Miller sometimes tries his hand at aping the style of the post-modernists. He's very bad at it, which reinforces my impression that this is just not a phenomenon that explains MAGA or Tea Party or any of that. Post truth is about a propaganda apparatus attempting to sell people on an ideological program antithetical to their own interests, that figures out what they want to hear and reports it as news.
 
superrific said:
I think you took Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance too seriously.
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Wow, that's a name from the past. I think I did kinda halfway read that as an undergrad. What slow torture that must've been for grad students or professors to grade undergrads' papers on that. Or anything else for that matter...
 
superrific said:
That's not an emoji, is it? Also, sure you're not confusing me with Ramrouser?
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Fair enough. The only emojis for that appear to involve eggplants, though, which is weird to me in a world where most Americans can watch The Hunting Wives at the click of a button. Who knew the emojiators were such prudes?
 
rodoheel said:
That makes sense. To go back to the subject of the thread, it does seem like philosophical debates about capital-T truth, when filtered down to people without the same intellectual or philosophical grounding, are easily distorted into "there is no such thing as lowercase-t truth" which can be manipulated to no end by people with bad-faith intentions. Hence [gestures broadly at everything].
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Another good way to look at it - Uppercase Truth: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
 
I agree with superrific inasmuch as my first impression of post-truth rightwing media is that it does, in fact, offer a grand (old) narrative about good (white Christians, enterprising small-business owners) against evil (most Jews, most college-educated, non-religious people, immigrants, most minorities). I think that's an accurate top-down view, by and large.

But there is something modestly postmodernist about how grassroots right-wing conspiracy movements like QAnon were delighting in the play of signification when they were "baking crumbs" (aside: who the fuck bakes crumbs?). The popcorn meme around QAnon--the storm is coming; get your popcorn--does reduce world events to a text, to entertainment, in fact. Oddly enough, the QAnon penchant for locating significance in the most meager data is biblical: the "first" postmodernists, the scholar Benjamin Sommer has argued, were rabbis engaged in midrashic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.

As an aside, I would not categorize The Crying of Lot 49 as a postmodernist novel. Not that it matters.
 
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