But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense.The first sentence is true, but the rest of the paragraph is nonsense. The best way to understand the way Postmodernists "play" at things is best distinguished from the way scientists "work" at things. It is the classical distinction between fate and destiny, between fortune and necessity - one force is random and playful, the other linear and ineluctuable. One is Zeus, the deceitful, cunning, shaping changing god of seduction. The other side is Ananke, Nemesis, necessity.
Postmodernism looks for the possible, however improbable in the same way that science uses probability to determine the likelihood of any possible outcome.
What's interesting is that both are motivated by skepticism toward transcendental meaning, the supernatural, the logocentric. Choose your word. The absolute truth that postmodernists deny is the same one Dawkins claims is a delusion. So it's a mystery to me why hardcore scientific atheists are so offended by it. More importantly the so-called Sokal hoax only appears to debunk postmodernism by virtue of the author's lack of sincerity. He's only aping postmodern language so therefore it can't be true. It's like a creationist using Intelligent Design to undermine evolutionary theory by introducing unprovable assertions into scientific discourse: it ultimately says more about the author of the hoax than it does about the theory.
Ultimately, science focuses on the accumulation of facts and postmodernism on the accumulation of meaning. The one side is a process for gathering information, and the other for interpreting and understanding. Both are designed to challenge our received notions about the world around us and force us to look at things from new and sometimes difficult perspectives.
Dawkins's ultimate greivance is that, unlike science, postmodernism is unnecessarily obscure. In comments to his article he writes:
I can imagine only one defence, which might go something like this. "The technical language of quantum theory, too, is extremely hard to understand. Here is a paragraph from a learned journal of quantum theory. Please furnish us with a translation into clear and meaningful English." I accept that this challenge might be impossible to meet. So, what is the difference? The difference is that quantum theory makes predictions about experimental measurements in the real world, which are verified to an accuracy equivalent (in Richard Feynman's vivid analogy) to specifying the width of North America to within one hairsbreadth. That's how quantum theory buys the right to be unintelligible to non-specialists.But this is necessity talking. Postmodernity uses specialized language to express the way meaning can be turned against itself. This is not mathematics. These are tropes. It's the difference between physics and poetry. One gives us the outcome we expect through experiment and repetition, the other undermines our preconceptions in order to lead us in unexpected directions. The specialized language of postmodernism is meant to take us outside ourselves, alienate us from meaning, break and bend understanding, in order to give us insight into possibilities not governed by prediction and the measurement of gross objects to within one hairsbreadth.
The point is to measure the meaning of North America: history, propaganda, industry, idealism, violence, beauty, ambition, and dream. All the things that Dawkins can't no matter how objective or accurate his predictions.
Ultimately this may be a revision of the separation of religion and science into distinct and discreet worlds. But unlike religion, the humanities (which is all postmodern theory really is) do not offer any ultimate truths, just new ways to ask questions and think about the world.
