tell me if you disagree with this okay
because I'm a psychologist not a
sociologist and so I'm dabbling in
things that are outside of my field of
expertise and there is some danger in
that but the center the central
postmodernist claim seems to me that
because there's a near infinite number
of ways to interpret a complex set of
phenomena which which actually happens
to be the case that you can't make a
case that any of those modes of
interpretation are canonical and so if
they're not canonical if that and if
that canonical element isn't based in
some kind of reality then it serves some
other master and so the master that it
hypothetically serves for the post
modernists is nothing but power because
that seems to be everything that they
believe in they don't believe in
competence they don't believe in
Authority they don't seem to believe in
an objective world because everything is
language mediated so it's an
extraordinarily cynical perspective that
that because there's an infinite number
of interpretations none of them are
canonical you can attribute it
everything to power and dominance okay
so that that seemed like a reasonable
summary of the okay it's a radical
relativism now but the strange thing is
despite okay and so what goes along with
that is the demolition of grand
narratives and so that would be
associated for example with the
rejection of thinkers like Jung and Eric
Norman because of course their
foundational thinkers in relationship to
the idea that there are embodied grand
narratives that's never touched but then
despite the fact that the grand
narrative is rejected there's a neo
Marxism that's tightly tightly allied
with post-modernism that also seems to
shade into this strange identity
politics and I don't two things I don't
understand the causal relationship there
like the the skeptical part of me thinks
that post-modernism was a was an
intellectual its intellectual camouflage
for the continuation of the kind of
pathological Marxism that produced the
Soviet Union and that has no independent
existence as an intellectual field
whatsoever but I still can't understand
how the post modernists can make the no
grand narrative claim but then immerse
themselves in this grand narrative
without anyone pointing out the evident
contradictions like I don't understand
that
what do you think about that well I can
only speak about literary professors
really and they seemed to me almost
universally in the u.s. to be very naive
I they seem to know nothing about actual
history political science or economics
so it is simply an attitude they have an
attitude in Marxism and become simply a
badge by which they Telegraph their
their solidarity with a working class
that they have nothing to do with right
and generally nothing but contempt yes
and the thing is that the campus leftist
our most notorious to me for their for
their rather snobbish treatment of staff
and they don't they don't have any
rapport with the actual working class
members of the you know of the
infrastructure the janitor the janitors
and you know and even even the
secretaries there's a kind of high and
mighty aristocracy you know about their
identity so just these are people who
who have wandered into the English
department and they're products of a
time when during the the new criticism
may wait when history of history and
psychology had been excluded right I
mean my ambition okay was I mean I love
the new criticism okay as a style of
textual analysis right and and that in
the new criticism had multiple
interpretations okay that were possible
okay and then and they were encouraged
in fact one of the one of the great
projects was made in max of serious 20th
century views when you had at least some
books I adored them in college it was
about Jane Austen or about you know
Emily Bronte or about Wordsworth and
they were collections of alternate views
of the same thing the idea that there
were no alternative views and there was
no relativistic in the situational kind
of an interpretive approach
it's nonsense okay mmm but the point was
we needed to restore a history to
literate literary study okay and we
needed to add psychology to it because
it was there was great animus against
Freud and when I arrived in graduate
school in fact I actually went into the
director of Graduate Studies and
protested the way Freud in Freudian were
used as negative terms play in a
sneering way by the very wass professors
right so we need to do and actually it
seemed like we were moving there okay in
the early 1970s was a great period of
psycho biography
about great about political figures okay
so I thought it's happening let's see
and all of a sudden it all got
short-circuited by this arrival you know
of post structuralism and post-modernism
in the in the in the 1970s right so I I
feel I'm an old historicist okay not a
newest or so so I having I think newest
tourism is an absolute scam all right
and it's like it's just a way it's like
tweezers do you like just a little bit
of this a little bit of that a little
bit of that you make a little tiny salad
I guess and I'm somehow this atomized
thing right it's supposed to mean
something it's all be very superficial
very cynical a very distance I like I am
i omit the product okay of old
historicism German philosopher
profession when I was a child what was
ejected archeology
everything I ever think about or say is
is related to an enormous time scheme
okay from from antiquity and indeed from
the Stone Age and that is the problem
with with these people they're they're
mal educated the post modernists and
academic Marxist okay are mal educated
embarrassingly so okay they know nothing
before the present SoCo okay it's
absolutely a joke before the
Enlightenment okay you mean perhaps he
might be useful people to talk about
what happens after neoclassicism which
by the way he failed to notice okay
a lot of what he was talking about it
turns out to see be simply the hangover
of neoclassicism okay this is how
ignorant that man was i mean he's he was
he was not talented as a researcher he
knew absolutely nothing okay was so you
know nothing about antiquity how can you
make any kind of large structure large
mechanism you know to analyze Western
culture without knowing about classical
antiquity do not see anything maybe this
was a person who had no business making
large theoretical statements about
anything well maybe part of it is that
if you if you generate an intelligible
doctrine of radical relativism then
there is no reason to assume that there
are distinctions between categories of
knowledge or between different levels of
quality of knowledge right so I've seen
the same thing in in the psychology
departments although we have the what
would you call it the luxury of being
bound
at least to some degree by the empirical
method and by biology right it's one of
the things that keeps most of the
branches of psychology relatively sane
you know because the real world is
actually built into it to some degree
but if you accept the post modernist
claim of radical relativism then you
completely demolish the idea that there
are quality levels that are associated
with education because everything
becomes the same and that seems to me to
be a perfectly reasonable justification
for maintaining ignorance you know like
Foucault I actually found him the most
readable of the LaCava Derrida Foucault
triad you can read Foucault I read
madness and civilization and a couple of
his other books and I thought they were
painfully obvious you know the idea that
mental disorder is in part a social
construct is self-evident to anybody who
has even a smattering of psychiatric
training I mean that the real narrow
medical types tend to to think of a
mental disorder let's say as something
that might be purely biological they
have a pure disease model but nobody's
who's a sophisticated thinker ever
thinks that it's a bit partly because
medicine is a brand of engineering not a
brand of science because it's associated
with health and the diagnostic
categories are hybrids between
physiological observation and
socio-cultural condition everyone knows
that and so when I read madness and
civilization I thought well that's not
radical that's just bloody self-evident
but well you know Foucault's admirers
actually think that he began you know
the entire turn toward toward a
sociological you know the grounding of
modern psychology the social psychology
was what well launched in the 1920s for
example evel's of ignorance of these
people who think Foucault is so original
have not read Durkheim they've not read
marks of aber they've never read urban
Goffman okay so in other words to to me
everything in Foucault seemed obvious to
me because I had read the sources from
which he was borrowing without
attribution so I mean again I know these
people I mean I mean in some cases knew
them in graduate school people who went
on to become these these admirers of
Foucault elec on Derrida and I know what
their training was their training was
purely within the English department
that's all they ever knew they never
made any research outside of that right
so the idea
Foucault is simply this ease a mechanism
it's like a little tiny kit by which
they can approach everything in culture
and then and then they put the
contortions of language the deliberate
labyrinth in elitist language at the
same time as pretending to be a leftist
okay this is one of the biggest frauds
every practice
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