- Academe's Poisonous Call-Out Culture
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
I cannot help thinking that something has gone seriously wrong when a scholar who is not transphobic or working against the interests of trans people, but, in fact, considering an important question, is labeled as "doing harm."
- Against Post-Modernism
A Marxist Critique
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1982
Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
- An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1998
Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
- Bad Marxism
Capitalism and Cultural Studies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2004
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the so-called 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
- The beginning of the end for identity politics?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
While the millennial left’s preoccupation with identity has not disappeared, the moralistic fire has grown dimmer.
- Chomsky on Post-Modernism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
- Clinton Manipulates Language of Intersectionality to Preserve Support from Minority Voters
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has been a master class in how to divorce economic issues from issues of race and gender by pushing the language of "intersectionality," which enables the political class to head off threats to their power and protect the status quo.
- Culture of Complaint
The Fraying of America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1993
Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic that we expect nothing else.
- Descent into Discourse
The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1990
Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
- EducationSources.ca
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2017
Web portal with sources of information about education and academia, including articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
- Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Many today find the idea of free speech appalling -- an awful fact to those who believe in freedom, quaint as it sounds. Left-liberals agitate to prevent disagreeable expression. Their masked street allies physically attack those who engage in it.
- Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1998
The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
- For Lust of Knowing
The Orientalists and their enemies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2006
A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said's book "a work of malignant charlatanry."
- Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1994
Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
- How Does the Subaltern Speak?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2013
Vivek Chibber argues that postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of Enlightenment universalism at its own peril. Focusing particularly on the strain of postcolonial theory known as subaltern studies, Chibber makes a strong case for why we can -- and must -- conceptualize the non-Western world through the same analytical lens that we use to understand developments in the West. He offers a sustained defense of theoretical approaches that emphasize universal categories like capitalism and class. His work constitutes an argument for the continued relevance of Marxism in the face of some of its most trenchant critics.
- How French 'Intellectuals' Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.
- Humanism Betrayed
Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2001
This book offers a defence of liberal humanism as a philosophy of higher education, particularly in the humanities, against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that are currently dominating the university.
- Humanism Betrayed - Table of Contents and Introduction
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2001
A defence of liberal humanism as a philosophy of higher education, particularly in the humanities, against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that are currently dominating the university.
- The Illusions of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1996
Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
- Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1993
A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
- Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1992
An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
- Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2001
We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
- The Origins of Post-Modernity
Resource Type: Book
Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016
Science and its enemies
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2016
Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 10, 2016
Back to School
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Education - about the world, and about social change in particular - is a key element in the work that Connexions does. In this issue of Other Voices, we explore a few aspects of the ways in which education and educational institutions are changing. We also look at ways in which education is used to bring about change.
- Postmodern Disrobed
Review of Intellectual Impostures
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1998
An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
- Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
- Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2013
Over the past fifty years, postmodern theory — an umbrella term generally used to refer to such diverse theoretical movements and paradigms as post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and others — has generally dominated most fields in the humanities and some in the social sciences. But the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent chronic crisis in capitalism have dealt a fatal theoretical blow to the varied and nearly ineffable assemblage of perspectives that are often grouped under the rubric of “postmodernism.” postmodernism was indeed tragedy. It was tragedy for the massive amounts of “cultural capital” that it wasted; it was tragedy for the defrauding of intellectual integrity that it represented; it was tragedy for the abandonment of reality that it recommended. Further, like the financial fiasco, it was criminal.
- The Professor of Parody
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butler’s ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
- Rationality/Science
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
- Edward Said's shadowy legacy
Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
- Science and its enemies
Introduction to the April 23, 2016 issue of Other Voices
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
- The Trouble with Theory
The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2008
Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
- Vanguard of Retrogression
"Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2001
When one probes the terms of the debate, what is truly amazing is that the ostensibly anti-Eurocentric multiculturalists are, without knowing it, purveying a remarkably Eurocentric version of what the Western tradition really is. The ultimate theoretical sources of today's multiculturalism are two very white and very dead European males, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
- Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.
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