Limits of Postmodernity

Postmodernism works, provided you have buffer between power and reality. A position that ultimately isn't tenable.

Lately I've been reflecting on what it means for something to be "bad" as opposed to a word more virulent like "evil" to explain my own emotional investment or lack thereof in things. Something is bad if it isn't ultimately going to work.

"Postmodernism" I should be clear, I am using via the general usage I come across. It likely means something specific in academic circles, but for me it is the general idea that "truth" is a construct determined by power. 

I'm persuaded by Brown professor Glenn Lowry, that money is not a social construction but a convention, but that is a technicality. It is sufficiently constructed and sufficiently neutral to be a good go to example of postmodernism in practice. 

How many bananas are there? This question represents the buffer zone in which postmodernism works, before it breaks down. The question has an answer, but our ability to determine the answer is extremely limited. All over the world there are Schrodinger's fruitbowl situations going where people think they have a banana, forgot they had a banana, expect to have bananas, are going to pick their bananas, are planting next seasons bananas, are going to the store for bananas, dropped their banana. 

The people will wake up tomorrow to discover they in fact, don't have bananas, discover their banana is rotten, have a cyclone take out their banana crop, have a fungus infect their crop, have a bumper crop, have their plantation repossessed or nationalised, realise they need more bananas for the recipe, get offered a free banana and discover a banana was in fact just a decorative plastic banana.

Multiply this uncertainty by everything and you have what all money represents. All the uncertainty in reality tends to be fairly stable, such that in large numbers like a global economy we can generally rely that while we don't know how many bananas there are, we are not going to be so far off as it turning out tomorrow that there are "no bananas" or "everything is bananas."

We expect that markets will quickly and efficiently correct for these uncertainties with price changes. But occassionally, a market can cumulate errors until reality pushes back and we can get a shocking crash. This is literally what happened in the GFC where Collaterized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were believed to be as safe as US government bonds, AAA rated by agencies, and they turned out to be worth nothing. There just is no way that tiny pieces of mortgage debt taken out by people with no income, no job and no savings in return for penalty interest rates that could be discharged by mailing the keys to the property back to the lender was as safe a financial product as bonds issued by the treasury of a state with its capacity to tax future generations to pay off the debt.

But for a while, paper wealth was created by the stories being told by those powerful enough to tell them, which could be exchanged for real wealth. People would buy shitty mortgages packaged as CDOs with money, real money that could be used to buy real assets.

That's the bufferzone in which postmodernism can work.

Postmodernism then, firstly requires modernity, it requires people with a capacity for story to be living on the grid. This is to say, they are not capable of feeding and clothing themselves, but instead dependent on massively complicated supply chains that span the globe. This means people can't really comprehend their own lives, but lacking comprehension they still function.

They go to work, and are vaguely aware this activity results in deposits being paid to their bank, a process that is increasingly an abstract operation of numbers. This allows them to go to a supermarket and purchase garlic when it isn't in season, because it is shipped from China or Mexico. If they live in Australia they may go to and from the shops in a vehicle that was manufactured in a factory somewhere around the world and then put onto a ship before being loaded onto a truck and driven to a dealership that then sold it or leased it either to them or some series of previous owners or users. It is fuelled with an oil derivative or charged from the grid both of which people around the world are currently fighting eachother to death about.

Humanity would literally die out, tomorrow, if the citizens of Earth were required to understand things before they used them.

As such, in this modern world where people who need milk don't milk something to get milk, you can tell reality altering stories by creating information that is separate and distinct from knowledge. 

Simple examples, you can tell a story about how popular a political leader is. Ordinary people do not have the resources to verify or investigate such claims. You can pay people just to repeat it, you can obfuscate the inaccuracy of this claim on reality by putting the source of the data behind a paywall so very few people can read the methodology and question it.

You can tell stories about the future that are baseless, like that in ten years we will have solved mortality and everyone will have nanobots in their bloodstream making ongoing repairs to our tissue in real time such that everybody alive can run a 200km ultramarathon. This way the average person can direct their creative energies to a tech-hub for decades before common-knowledge stumbles upon the reality that there is nothing to indicate such breakthroughs are imminent.

Such stories alter reality by having people believe them. Such that even if the stories have no basis in reality, anyone trying to build a working understanding of reality now have to contend with a reality where a bunch of people believe in something unreal. eg. people trying to address catastrophic climate change have to build into their solutions the fact that a whole bunch of people think the issue is a hoax.

Conclusion

The point of this stubby nub of a post, is that yes, thinkers like Michel Foucalt and Derrida and Judith Butler have made genuine contributions to intellectual thought including useful ideas. 

But it operates in this limited space that basically says "a lie can persist up until the point that the truth is revealed."

So yes, power knowledge is a thing, you can class same-sex attraction as a mental illness that spreads through social contagion (grooming) and try to cure it through electroshock therapy for a very long time, but it isn't going to work because homosexuality appears to be innate and just crops up in the population so all you do is increase the suffering for as long as you can persist in the delusion. 

How long such an example can persist is undetermined. Conversion therapy is still in effect in the world, yet other jurisdictions have presumably done enough science based mapping to abandon stories for knowledge and determined that there is no evidence conversion therapy works, and there is evidence it is damaging.

While I concede that postmodernist thought has a place, I think it is bad, as in it can't work. The sum total of postmodernism's promise is that it can make us feel good until our denial can no longer be sustained. 

Personally, I would rather feel bad now by confronting exactly how bleak a situation is, so I can feel better in the future by reacting to reality in some positive action beyond telling myself a feel good story.

Go scientific method!