In t'other thread, I posed the question of whether the postmodern era happened. Two thirds said Yes, one-third No. A tenth said Yeah but it was pomo's fault. Lots of commentary from a few of the naysayers and the yeah-butters but not so much about whether the postmodern era occurred, more along the lines of my starting point for this thread, a quote from our single-radianed elder statesman:

Back in the day I'd found philosophical p0m0 to be an academically effete redundancy selling the news a day late and dollar short that "metanarratives, epistemes" were suspect because they – their subject Man – had been decentered. Big whup. Modernity organically grows out of the first great (though marginalized) decentering: Copernicus' Heliocentric model of the solar system, followed by (just the highlights):

• Galileo's Mediocrity Principle, Relativity & (revived) "atomism"
• Spinoza's Natura Naturans, Conatus, Affects ... & (first of a kind) biblical criticism/deconstruction
• Newton's Gravity constant (death of telelogy)
• Hume's Bundle theory of "the self", Induction problem & Is-Ought "guillotine"
• Darwin-Wallace's speciation (descent) by Natural Selection
• Boltzmann's 2nd law of thermodynamics ("heat death of the universe")
• Schopenhauer-Nietzsche's Will ("unconscious") ... genealogical method, perspectivism, etc
• political-economic anarchism (mutualist, syndicalist, libertarian communist, etc)
• Einstein's Relativity theories
• quantum uncertainty
• Gödel's Incompleteness theorems (+ Turing, Von Neumann, Chaitin, Wolfram)
• Shannon's Information entropy
• Wittgenstein's forms of life-language games-meaning is usage
• fallibilism ... falsificationism ...
• semiotics ... structuralism ...
• Chomsky's Universal Generative Grammar
• absurdism (e.g. Zapffe, Camus)
• economic democracy (stakeholder socioeconomics contra shareholder capitalism)
• Kahneman & Tverksy's cognitive biases & prospect theory — 180 Proof

The question is: Does postmodern philosophy add anything _new_?

The way I'd probably break this down is as follows: does postmodernism have
- descriptive
- predictive
- prescriptive
- novel
value? (Will add more e.g. cognitive if you like.)

The previous thread suggests a small majority of us think it has a descriptive value. A few choice prognostications from Lyotard suggest a predictive value:

- that it would be necessary for computers to legitimise future knowledge and discovery, e.g. that people would trust a computation before pen & paper type theory or human expertise, experience and skill.
- that this dependence on technology would massively accelerate it's investment and growth
- that knowledge (data, now it's all on computers) would be commidified and mercantilised, collected for the purpose of being sold to other people collecting knowledge
- that the absorption of knowledge would become ever less about training minds and ever more vocational
- that people would choose many disconnected micronarratives over grand narratives, for instance may hold different views in different contexts that, put together, would contradict or otherwise not cohere
- that computation would aid these micronarratives by making access to information fast and easy.

What about ethics? Okay, pomo has observed the world, found some epoch, and figured out where it's all going, but what are we supposed to do about it? Lyotard's answer to this was for us to abandon conformity in favour of diversity, to have lots of different kinds of knowing and not just one. This could be on an individual or social level: the important thing is that discourse is fleshed out from all perspectives.

What Lyotard was arguing for, whether he knew it or not, was noise as an ethic. This makes pomo ethics part of an optimisation problem. When genomes mutate, what they're doing is adding noise (error, variance) to the genome, which allows for nature to find better solutions to ecological problems. However Lyotard champions noise for noise's sake: there is no fitness function, no selection criteria... No one has a perspective by which to judge a micronarrative inferior to another or to a grand narrative.

180 argues that this is nothing new. Actually, no, he argues that this has precursors; he concludes that this is nothing new. The most obvious precursor is Wittgenstein, but Wittgenstein did not apply language games to ethics and politics; Lyotard did, so this is new, however incremental. And there's a little Darwin in there in moving from teleological, targeted, designed ethics to diversity through a pseudo-randomisation of narratives, but not so far as selection.

Another prescription is the thorough open-mindedness of Derrida. While modernism is bias bottom-up, typically anthropocentrism, but also ethnic and gender bias (proof that modernists hardly tried to escape their own ignorance), Derrida teaches his own kind of pluralism, not of epistemologies but of viewpoints, to systematically find every possible interpretation of a text without preferring one over another, and every possible authorial bias that hides and us hidden by those readings.

My favourite example is from queer critical theory but told to me by an American playwright who's name annoyingly escapes me at the moment (I swear it's David something but not Mamet). Deconstructing Shakespeare's Othello, a very strong case can be made that Iago is gay (his romantic-sounding pledge of devotion to Othello, his ambiguous "I lay with Cassio lately", but ultimately his frustrating (but genius) refusal to explain why he planned Desdemona's murder).

We can't ask Shakespeare, but that's not grounds to accept a classical interpretation. We know that Hitchcock did a similar thing in Rope: had two gay villains that audiences didn't realise were gay, so it's far from unthinkable. Perhaps this is just my postmodern bias, but the story seems much better this way, much more satisfying and thrilling, and ultimately that's why I accept it. A reliance on some internal or external justification for either this or a classical interpretation is never going to be forthcoming: we cannot reason our way out of this; all we can do is generate hypotheses and choose what makes sense to us. Rationalism fails us, but diversity has our backs.

Moral relativism is not a postmodern invention, however it is so strongly associated with pomo that it is the basis of Chomsky's criticism: you can't be a moral relativist, having all possible perspectives at once, so pomo is rubbish.

But you can be a moral relativist. Moral relativism doesn't mean that you take every position. I don't agree with infant genital mutilation, but I understand that an orthodox Jew will have a different perspective, and that has an impact on how I discuss the issue with them (I'm not likely to appeal to shame, for instance). On less disturbing matters, such as trans women's use of ladies' toilets, I don't have my own opinion but am sympathetic to both contrary arguments, even if one of them is usually stated in a demented way (and it ain't the post-gender argument that's demented).

How is this different from modernist relativism? In and of itself, not much. The difference is in the status of relativism. Postmodernism is about diversity, not necessarily within an individual but within a society; as such, relativism has a higher status in pomo than in modo (hence the association with the former more than the latter).

All of the seeds of pomo ethics lie within modernism, but this isn't particularly insightful. Modernism has evolved. Eventually it speciated. We don't argue that humans are a kind of fish simply because of continuity. 180's list above is a good prehistory of postmodernism (except the last few entries): a sequence of blows to traditional modern ways of thinking that, with some historical events thrown in (suffrage, the world wars), modernism could not survive. It ceased to be itself. Where modernism ends and postmodernism begins is like asking how many grains of sand constitute a sand dune. But I digress.

What is the novelty of postmodernism if it's largely a putting together of ideas that occurred during the modern era? The obvious one is its brand and application of plurality. If the postmodern condition is an acceptance that no simple set of metanarratives will apply to all, the superposition of different, contradictory micronarratives (such as the two views on ladies' toilets) is the inevitable result... shy of one group defeating the other by other means (political or violent oppression, for instance).

Much of what we complain about in pomo is noise. Someone says something that is obviously stupid and biased and based on ignorance... #sopomo. But noise is how nature figured out how to make a human that could make a computer. Selecting one artefact and running with it, suppressing the rest, is not only disastrous in practice (there goes the planet), it doesn't work in theory. Yes, modernism evolved over time and, yes, we could keep calling whatever we have now modernism until it's explored every variant, contradicting itself many times over (DESCARTES: you can figure everything out by thinking hard; KANT: no you can't), but that's incoherent, slow, and unlikely to even approach success. A more optimal, fast-paced approach for our fast-paced lives is to do what Derrida said: explore all the possibilities now and let them co-exist, at least for a while.

My personal view is that humans will naturally provide the rest of the optimisation, the selection criteria to eliminate the bullshit and keep the best of all possible narratives, which takes us into memetics. It won't bring back metanarratives any more than evolution will result in a single species of identical individuals.

As a final observation, since we're not an infinite number of monkeys, the postmodernism we ended up with is only one of many possible postmodernisms. It's not necessarily good. (In principle, as someone pointed out, you could deconstruct Of Grammatology and get different deconstructions.) A lot of the science criticism, especially from the feminist social constructivists and religious bandwagon-jumpers, has been utterly moronic. I've previously argued that's the price to pay for the good stuff that has improved science practice, but here I'd like to point out that even if the quality of postmodern criticism hasn't been high on average, that doesn't mean we should abandon diversity and deconstruction, pick a metanarrative or two, and carry on under the pretence that we're right. We could demand, or at least wish for, a better class of pomo. In fact, the best tools against things like rampant social constructivism and post-truth politics seem to me to be the very tools of postmodernism, to dismantle shallow narratives and lay bare the biases of their authors. Certainly better and quicker than waiting for a paradigm shift.