Metaphenomenalism #16

Metaphenomenalism, 2020

#3 makes the point that practicing logocentrism in and of itself is ineluctably increasingly exclusive as to the players involved [because seeking an otherwise impossible truth e.g. Comte's positivism] becoming as Benjamin pointed out ever more distracted from the common truth of human life on earth, but as Schrodinger stated, any notion of throwing baby truths out with the bathwaters of old narratives is in all probability not a very good idea. So it seems that we have never yet been modern [about biology and cosmology], pace Latour, and so must be cautious about concepts of post-truth ?

Poststructuralism has been characterised by opposing previously held beliefs about the nature of humans and our cultures. It is anti-universalist and anti-essentialist i.e. doesn't believe in universal principles that could explain human nature and culture, as there is basically no such thing (essence). Even though most people would agree with a wide variety of human and cultural phenotypes, few would agree with this kind of relativistic view. Poststructuralism opposes any grand meta-narratives that explain historic trajectories and predict future trajectories. Marxism is probably the best example of such a grand narrative. What could be more proof of poststructuralism than the failure of the implementation of Marxism all around the globe? We have come to live in a de-ideologized world where many have given up to bring liberal democracies to less enlightened peoples or to bring a sense of communist solidarity to the capitalist folks. We are living in a more globalised materialistic world with less ideology, the opposite of what Marx has predicted. The metanarrative that Marx and Engles came up with was supposed to be the most scientific account possible at the time. It was the narrative of how small egalitarian huntergatherer bands became egalitarian food-producing and wealth-owning societies. Their revolution was not meant to be progress but regress to that natural "original state of mankind". Wherever Marxism was implemented it failed as the system was parasitized by power-hungry people and abused. Marxism could only work if people were like Rousseau's "noble savage", instead those who contributed to the corruption of the system behaved like Hobbsean humans. We all know that people aren't either-or, but are somewhere on a spectrum in between. What's more, almost all people behave nicely towards in-group members (family, local community, nation), it's when it comes to out-group members that our attitudes differ widely. Poststructuralism made kind of sense until about the millennium. Since then we have been seeing increasing polarization and tribalism. Ironically, while the role of ideology has been diminishing internationally it has been vastly increasing nationally. We have seen the same patterns repeating in many Western countries, most of all in the USA. This is a serious blow to Poststructuralism. If metanarratives like Marxism can be seen as a failure to explain history, Poststructuralism can be seen as a failure to understand the present. Obviously, our values aren't as relative as poststructuralism may have us believe. The error that Poststructuralism made was rejecting all metanarratives instead of trying to find out what was right and wrong about those metanarratives. Salomon Schwarz created a circle of (partially opposing) human values. We can see Hobbes in the "Power" segment (people striving for wealth and control of others and Rousseau in the opposite "Universalism" segment (justice, openness, self-choice).

Postmodernism describes a range of conceptual frameworks and ideologies that are defined in opposition to those commonly associated with ideologies of modernity and modernist notions of knowledge and science, such as materialism, realism, positivism, formalism, structuralism, dogmatism and reductionism.

Richard Devetak, Anthony Burke, Jim George (eds), An Introduction to International Relations (Cambridge University Press), 2012

This paper examines the idea that the self is now post-modern, meaning fragmented, fluid, boundaryless, defenseless and lacking identity. This idea was popular a while back, but it now looks faddish and outdated. The pomo self theorists over-emphasized some things and under-emphasized others, i.e. they engaged in the fallacy of reduction. They mistook minor changes in the self for major ones. They overlooked the power of the primary group. And they under-rated the self's defenses, especially inner speech as a device for protecting the self and agency as a weapon for managing one's environment. Keywords Postmodern self Relativism Primary group Inner speech Norbert Wiley is professor emeritus of Sociology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He is now a selfemployed writer living in the San Francisco Bay area. A co-author of The Bowling Green Uprising: How the Quiet Fifties Became the Political Sixties, his current book project is Inner Speech and the Reflective Self.

2017

The linguistic turn here is based on the belief that because language is riven with figuration a mobile army of metaphors metonyms and anthropomorphism to borrows Nietzsche's phrase it cannot represent the world with any degree of accuracy let alone in the immediate undistorted way that some theories of mind have for their meaning, rather than on reference to some theories of mind have claimed.. The temper of the times is apparent from the widespread eagerness to embrace the death of the subject a diktat which became as Perry Anderson noted the slogan of the decade. The proclamation filtered through the various disciplines associated with structuralist theory. Index Terms-Postmodernism, metaphysical, anthropocentric, human integration, feminism.