Knowledge vs. Postmodern Knowledge, pt. 1

The journey through discourse in the last three posts was longer than planned, but it was necessary to really unravel the deceptions at the heart of this thinking. The logical contradiction inherent in fusing poststructuralist linguistic meaninglessness and cultural Marxist social activism is sufficient to reveal the self-serving insincerity of its promoters. In a later post I will break down some of the personality types attracted to Postmodern theories of discourse, but first it is necessary to frame this blend of intellectual masturbation and power-seeking within a much older discussion on the fundamental nature of human knowledge.

It is generally the practice of this blog to avoid academic jargon as much as possible, and carefully define technical terms when it is necessary to consider them. The reason for this is that slippery opaque wording is often used to confuse and disorient while creating an undeserved air of intelligence and authority in the one using them. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to introduce words that refer to specific circumstances that do not have a more common synonym. Hermeneutics, or the theory and practice of interpreting strange texts and objects was one such word; epistemology is another. 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary:

So epistemology basically refers to what are considered acceptable ways of knowing and understanding. If you claim something true or dismiss it as folklore, you are making an epistemological judgment. 

Epistemology is a useful term in certain contexts. Determining the legitimacy of our knowledge is obviously incredibly important, as is recognizing the limits to what finite beings can grasp about the nature of reality. Historical studies like archaeology and branches of anthropology use epistemology as a way of analyzing and comparing the development of the belief systems of different cultures. 

Aurochs, Horses, and Rhinoceroses, ca. 30-28,000 BC, wall painting, Chauvet Cave,Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France

Humans see before they read. Mimetics precede linguistics developmentally, and we were making pictures scores of millennia before the first Sumerian penned a pictogram. Which was still mimetic before it became linguistic. Understanding how humans conceptualize the world around them is understanding their epistemology.

Did the ancients believe  images could influence reality? Perhaps bring a good hunt? If so, that's an epistemological error.

The problem arises, as is inevitably the case, when epistemology is perverted by fictional notions of discourse. This began with "structural" anthropology, a concept that bore the same resemblance to human biodiversity that structuralist linguistics did to human communication. 

Quelle suprise.

To be fair, Levi-Strauss' "insights" weren't based entirely on incoherent, decades-old thought pictures. He also sought authentic knowledge by "going native." The authenticity is apparent in his conclusions.

His relationship to the Swiss Family Robinson remains unclear. 











He concludes:

Culture has no intrinsic meaning outside of the universal structures that determine it.

Behold the path to discourse: 

If all human societies are simply expressions of the same structural forces, then there are no intrinsic differences between their customs and beliefs.

From here springs all the nonsensical cultural relativism that is a trademark of Postmodernism. As is typical, Levi-Strauss' flawed model became treated as the reality that it incorrectly represents, and all subsequent "rethinkings," "critical analyses," "deconstructions," "unpackings," and other mastications have taken as gospel the structuralist fallacy that cultures are interchangeable. From this perspective, epistemology (theory of knowledge, or how we know) becomes epistemologies, or the subjective grounds on which a particular culture thinks it can know things. Fundamentally, shamanism is no different from science... they're just different epistemologies, and claiming Western empiricism and logic are superior to other forms of "knowledge" production is "privilege" and oppressive. One more term that becomes inverted from its actual meaning for confusing, rhetorical purposes. 

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Education of the Children of Clovis, 1861, oil on canvas, 127 × 176.8 cm, private collection.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the fatal flaw at Postmodern core is the inescapable fact humans learn progressively and empirically through cumulative experiences. The late classical architecture, Merovingian costume and social order, even the weapon choice are discursive. The consequences of this discourse, however, are deadly real.



As always, Postmodernists put the cart before the horse. They claim to be able to float above the messiness of human experience and claim insight into the true nature of our reality, despite being formed and framed within particular historical discursive contexts themselves. The truth is that they are not offering higher-order commentary (or meta-commentary) on epistemology in general, but a different, competing theory of knowledge that can be judged epistemologically.  To clarify: 

To a Postmodernist, all epistemologies are equally meaningless discursive constructions

But we should know by now how far to trust Postmodernist claims:

These graphics are merely an approximate representation of the makeup of epistemology. They represent my own divisions and do not profess either to perfectly replicate the field they diagram or take its place in any meaningful way. 

They do, however illustrate the intellectual dishonesty and power-hungry pretension of pretending that a tiny iteration of the latest "I know the TRUE nature of reality" takes precedence over the nature of human interaction with the world. 









Any attempt to define different methods of acquiring knowledge is bound to be incomplete, since human communication is necessarily imperfect. The reality is that most schools of thought don't fall purely into one or the other category, but tend to combine approaches in more organic ways, with Postmodernism being a notable exception. However, one or the other tendency tends to predominate in a given case, and since their roots stretch back to the beginnings of the Western tradition, it is productive to consider them as if they were distinct. 

It all goes back to Plato and Aristotle

Raphael, Plato and Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens, 1509-11, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican

These two thinkers represent the foundation of the Western philosophical tradition, and though Aristotle spent many years as Plato's student, the two fundamentally disagreed. For Plato, this world is merely a projection of a higher perfect reality that we must strive to align ourselves with. For Aristotle, knowledge began in observation, before moving outward and upward logically to draw conclusions. The former is idealistic and absolutist, the later pragmatic and open to revision.

Top-Down (Deductive) Theories of Knowledge

Plato's body of work is too extensive to attempt to summarize here; it will suffice to say that he is one of the most influential thinkers of all time. The centerpiece of his epistemology, however, is the concept of the Forms, ideal, perfect archetypes to ideas and things in our material world, that exist on a higher or abstract level of reality. Plato's reasoning is that we can recognize commonalities between things despite them not being exactly the same. He concluded that there must be some perfect essence, or Form, like 'Human' or 'Truth' that is imperfectly realized in  individual examples. 'Human' shines through in each person, just as 'Truth' can be found to some degree in any fact. Because of this relationship, our reality is a mere projection; it is to the world of the Forms what a picture or shadow is to us. The Forms cannot be perceived or apprehended directly - they exist above even abstract concepts like math - so Plato used figurative techniques like metaphor and allegory to hint at them. 

Jan Saenredam after Cornelis van Haarlem, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, 1604, engraving
Plato tries to lead the mind to the Forms through comparison and analogy. He has us pretend we are prisoners in a cave who know only shadows of  puppets as reality. By having us scale to awareness of real light, then to the blazing sun, he creates  comparisons for the relationship between our material reality, the world of abstract concepts like math, and the Forms.

The easiest way to understand the forms it through categorical similarities, or, in other words, what those in a category, such as humans or facts, have in common. Plato noticed that we recognize different members within such a group despite no examples being exactly the same, and concluded that there must be some sort of higher, perfect transcendental reality or Form that is imperfectly expressed in each of them. All people are iterations of the Form of person, just as all facts in some way express Truth. 

Horatio Greenough, George Washington,  1832, marble, 3.5 m, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

The connection between Truth, Beauty, and the Good, the highest of Plato's Forms, established the philosophical foundations of Western art theory. The powerful, idealized physique and antique costume of Greenough's figure uses conventions of classical beauty to represent Washington's wisdom and virtue. 

Derrida attacked this formation by charging Plato with unjustly privileging the spoken word (logos) over writing, and noting that one cannot comment meaningfully on transcendentals through something as limited and arbitrary as text. Believe it or not, this constitutes the foundation for the entire Postmodern attack on perhaps the greatest "intellectual" straw man of the 20th century: The "Western Metaphysical Tradition." Perhaps Derrida needs to get outside the text once in a while.



There is a dangerous conceit in Plato that has nothing to do with "privileging" a medium, and that is the idea that humans, with all their flaws and limitations, are capable of a pure understanding of transcendentals. His famous Republic introduces the Philosopher King, an individual who has apprehended the Forms of Good, Truth, and Beauty in what reads like a mystical epiphany, and so equipped with true knowledge of reality, is empowered to rule. The problem, of course, is determining who has really seen the Forms from those who simply crave dominance and inevitably camps. This is actually a deeper problem than personal ambition. Any idealizing construct like the Forms imagines something more fundamentally important than the integrity, dignity, and freedom of the individual person. Rather than the true wonder of diversity - the richness of human biodiversity - individuality is recast as an imperfection, a deviation from an imaginary ideal that is both abstract and inhuman. When the two come into conflict, the human is less important than this imaginary ideal and any repression can be justified in the name of a fantasy. 

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793 oil on canvas, 165.1 x 128.3 cm, Muses Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

This is the greatest problem with Enlightenment ideology: an absolute faith in an abstract "reason" detached from human experience but limited by an eighteenth-century world view. The impossiblity of meeting such an inhuman standard frequently triggers purity spirals into depravity as these rationalists hold each other to increasingly impossible standards. French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat is showing here, dying from knife blow, while drafting a list of enemies for execution.










Many of today's problems arise from the incompatibilities between "rationalist" Enlightenment concepts of human nature and human nature. 

Willey Reveley, Elevation, section and plan of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary, 1791

The Panopticon was a dehumanizing essay in centralization and anonymous surveillance that foreshadowed modern privacy concerns. 

To say nothing of how the blank slate theory of human development and radical egalitarianism have persisted in the face of increasing knowledge of genetics and incontrovertible evidence of human biodiversity. 










The same holds for monstrous, machine-like ideology of Modernism, which crushed the human spirit into soulless abstract polyhedra and concrete abominations in the name of bizarre aphorisms like "truth to materials" that rest solely on absolutist misconceptions of human reason. Well, misconceptions about reason and, of course, the authority of the Philosopher's Name, that secret talisman which allows you to keep basing arguments off erroneous, nonsensical assumptions by invoking the name of their inventor. 

Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier and Wallace K. Harrison, United Nations Building, 1948-52, New York

How appropriate that Le Corbusier, the 20th century's greatest crime against architecture, was involved in designing the headquarters of the organization that works hardest to crush individuality and identity beneath an undifferentiated unaccountable global hegemony.




One of the surest signs that this thinking overstates its claims is the fact that the secret transcendence always resembles an amped-up version of the "discoverer's" own reality. There is a legitimate critique to be made that Plato's reversed cause and effect when he imagined superior forms of familiar ideas, and then pretended that they take precedence over the very things that inspired them.

Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490, pen and ink with wash over metalpoint on paper, 34.6 cm × 25.5 cm, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Renaissance Humanists were intoxicated with newly rediscovered ideas from the classical world. They combined the mathematical mysticism of Pythagoras with Platonic ideas about the potential perfectibility of human nature to imagine a transcendence defined by geometric harmony and simplicity. 

Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man represents bodily perfection as an expression of an abstracted idealized cosmic order represented by the simplest of shapes, the circle and square.












The idea that flawed, mortal beings are perfectible dangerously foreshadows the horrors of modern secular transcendences like Marxism. However, in the Renaissance, this belief was tempered by Christianity, which denied the possibility of perfection in this world. The atheistic ideology of the Enlightenment removed that check, leaving nothing behind but a brutal, dehumanized geometric order masquerading as transcendence. 

Etienne-Louis Boullée, Monument to Sir Isaac Newton (unbuilt project), 1784

Newton is something of an Enlightenment deity for his mathematical modeling of reality. Note the consistent huge soulless abstract geometries that seem to rear their heads in any idealist aesthetic. Here, the new tech projected as the true meaning of reality was the refined mathematical reasoning of the calculus, the discovery of which seemed to symbolize the potential of human reason. Of course, Newton, like his only intellectual peer Aristotle, couldn't explain how his system originates. He was also wrong. And if Newton was unable to establish a clear, rational account of the world, all the clown carloads of Postmodernists in the world are likely to succeed. 








The latest iteration of this sort of projection is simulated reality, or the idea that this universe is merely a simulation in some sort of alien computer. 

Once again, the latest technology, in this case some simplified astrophysical speculation and our own digital world become a template for an imaginary higher order. How is this substantially different from Plato? 

Given that there are things beyond our limited understanding, we will likely always speculate that what lies beyond the scope of our conception seems familiar. 



Postmodernism is a bit different in that it rejects the possibility of a higher truth like the Forms, though it does incoherently echo the Marxist belief that the true nature of reality lies in human affairs, but buried beneath a false ideological surface. While it claims to deconstruct the master narratives of the post-Enlightenment world, Postmodernism actually fits the larger Enlightenment conceit that fallible humans are capable of discerning the hidden, timeless meaning (or meaninglessness) of existence. The twist is that it denies its own unstated claim to transcendence, and is therefore blind to this self-contradictory nature. This helps to explain  the absurd Postmodern faith in progress in despite defining the world as a meaningless discursive construct. If we think of progress as a progression towards power rather then some kind of moral evolution (there are no "morals") it makes more sense. 


What is especially revolting about this is the way that the thought leaders on the left have masked this empty, discursive will to power beneath the fig leaf of the traditional morality that their own philosophy dismisses as false consciousness. The "philosophical" attack on the legitimacy of culture is directed only at the West; to others, the "resistance" is couched in terms that drip with historical values, such as fairness, justice, etc. 

Frida Kahlo, Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, 1954, oil on masonite, 76 x 61 cm, Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City.

The original name for this propaganda clinic reveals the scrambled thoughts of this confused Marxist: Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism. Note the garbled blend of traditional moral judgments repurposed as propagandastic lies. 

Postmodernists love "critical" readings where they "problematize" the surface meaning of some work of art to reveal hidden oppression. Consider it an homage when I point out that the "healing hands" of Marxism suggest nothing more than voyeurism and sexual assault.

.

Curiously, this moral midget's concern with justice and oppression was no where to be found during her adulterous 1937 affair with noted chicken entrepreneur, Colonel Sanders, I mean, psychotic mass murderer, Leon Trotsky. 

The pathological hypocrisy of artists' support for the most bloodthirsty ideology in human history borders on the treasonous. 






Perhaps Postmodernism did project its historical and technological circumstances into a notion of transcendence; in this case, the undifferentiated, superficial, commodified pap that defined the mass media culture of post-war America. A new world of sprawling suburbs and three universally available t.v. networks created an historically unprecedented cultural conformity that was fundamentally alien to countless millennia of human social evolution, yet managed to present itself as completely natural. Everything in the world in now available, but all of it - news, ads, entertainment, documentary, sports - expressed in the same cathode glow. 

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? 1956, collage on paper, 26 x 24.8 cm, Collection, Kunsthalle Tbingen. Sammlung Zundel, Germany

Hamilton was one of the first Pop artists, a movement based on the imagery and iconography of post-war mass consumer culture. Is it hard to believe that the society coming to grips with this new reality could be bamboozled with tales of discourse and simulacra?











Yet, at the same time, the cathode generation grew up in a society shaped by strong traditional morality, which meant that they internalized, and unconsciously lived by, the same values that they happily tossed away. Perhaps this accounts for the seeming inability of a certain cohort to recognize the reality of cultural difference and human biodiversity while still role playing 60's campus radicals a half century too late. 

Cover of the 1983 edition of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle; Movie audience wearing 3D glasses, photo by J.R. Eyerman, Paramount Theater, Hollywood, Nov. 26, 1952

Perhaps de Bord and other Postmodern theorist were partially right in their concept that society is merely a spectacle, in their time. But offering up the vapidity of Disneyland or The Sullivan Show as the true nature of reality is as silly as projecting Neoplatonic geometry in the Renaissance. 

So the Postmodern concept of discourse analysis, in any interation, belongs under the umbrella of top-down, deductive, idealistic structures that subordinate the human dignity to the fantasy of some fabricated higher truth. It is different from others, in that it pretends that there is no higher reality, but that is itself consistent with the superficial, media-fabricated reality that Postmodernism grew up in. 

We'll mark it negative, to acknowledge the pretense that discourse isn't claim of higher knowledge.

This is a decent point to break. The next post will consider the other main epistemological approaches in the Western tradition - empiricism and faith - and how they offer more intellectually honest pathways to knowledge.