https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ih4avuHRUUc
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 central post-modernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, 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 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 because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical, you can attribute it to everything to power and dominance. Okay, so that seemed like a reasonable summary of the post-modernist… Yes, exactly. It’s a radical relativism. 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, so that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Eric Neumann, because of course they’re 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 skeptical part of me thinks that post-modernism was an intellectual… It’s 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. So what do you think about that? Well, I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the US, to be very naive. They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science or economics. It’s simply an attitude. They have an attitude. Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. And generally nothing but contempt. Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. They don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure, the janitors, and even the secretaries. There’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy. These are people who have wandered into the English department and were products of a time when, during the new criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was, I love the new criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the new criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was Maiden Mac’s series, 20th Century Views. You had at least books, I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Bronte or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views and there was no relativistic situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense. But the point was we needed to restore history to literary study and we needed to add psychology to it because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors. It seemed like we were moving there. The early 1970s was a great period of psychobiography about political figures. So I thought it’s happening. All of a sudden it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and post-modernism in the 1970s. So I feel I’m an old historicist, not a new historicist. I think new historicism is an absolute scam. It’s just a way, it’s like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad. And somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something. It’s all to me very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I am the product of old historicism, of German philology. My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archaeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They’re mal-educated. The post-modernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which by the way he failed to notice. A lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large mechanism to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Well, maybe part of it is that 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. I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology. It’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane. Because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist 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 Lacan-Dérida-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, the real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let’s say, as something that might be purely biological. They have a peer disease model, but nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. It’s 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 sociocultural 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 the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. The social psychology was well launched in the 1920s, for example. The levels of ignorance, these people who think Foucault was so original have not read Durkheim, they’ve not read Max Weber, they’ve not read Erwin Goffman. In other words, 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, in some cases, I knew them in graduate school, people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, 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? And so the idea… Foucault is simply this mechanism, it’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture. And then the contortions of language, the deliberate, labyrinthine, elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist, this is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced.