On favoring complexity

[quietphilosophe]

The latest round of criticism for the postmodern thought camp, perhaps surprisingly, isn't coming from the anthropologists and historians and sociologists--the people who probably have the most to lose if we actually take what postmodernism is saying and apply it accordingly.  It's actually coming more from the hard sciences.  Alan Sokal's

Comments

Re: No, no, a thousand times no.

[anonymous]

Formatting got messed up on that last reply, sorry.

[quietphilosophe]

they take on the language of obscurity for no good reason

And I totally disagree with this point, which seems to be the crux of our divergence. Can you point towards particular examples? I'm not going to disagree that some of the speech is unnecessarily complex--Deleuze immediately comes to mind--but I can think of many examples (all of the ones I cited) that retain nuances that the simplifications lack. Understanding the nuances that accompany the words, I feel, would create a more interesting dialogue for generations to come--and possibly allow them to do more.

[quietphilosophe]

Philosophy has a bad rep, and postmodern philosophy has the worst of all. In the case of postmodern philosophy, it really does seem pretty much deserved.

Mind me asking what po-mo you've actually read? At once you make a fairly sweeping statement that could only be validated by submersion in the field and then you say:

I stick to books written for the layman

Which, you know, po-mos aren't exactly written for the layman. The way I see it, there's a bit of a trickle-down effect, where words being thrown around in the academic community can be filtered down through the quasi-intellectuals of society. Eventually, one would hope, the valuable concepts would get associated into the vocabulary.

Still, I fail to see how you can reconcile the two claims. Either you've read po-mos or not. I'm not criticizing you for avoiding them. I'm criticizing you for your assertions on something that you admittedly know very little about.