About us | Notes alias Guff

Notes:

Even so…
we are not postmodernists or minimalists nor adherents to any other anti-rationalist intellectual fad: structure is fascinating, but the charms of poststructuralism leave us cold. Nor are we inclined to tilt at these specious 'windmills', others have reduced them to ruins – most throughly, physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.

Intellectual Impostures or Fashionable Nonsense

In their critique of the abuse of science by postmodern philosophers, Sokal and Bricmont^[1]; leave a naked – although still hopelessly vain and fashionable – 'Empereur' exposed amongst the rubble. Clearly postmodernism is immune to refutation and rational argument: it seems only a novel anti-rationalist fad can displace an entrenched one.

Even allowing for the authors' explicit disavowal of any "strong views on postmodernism in art, architecture…", for us, their analysis and conclusions can be rigourously applied to the practice of architecture under the pervasive and corrosive influence of deconstructionism and postmodernist 'architectural theories'.^[2]

1. A critique of postmodern philosophers' abuse of science and of epistemic relativism by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Published as:
   • Impostures Intellectuelles [ISBN 2253942766. Paris, 1997]
   • Intellectual Impostures [ISBN 1 86197 074 9. London, 1998]
   • Fashionable Nonsense [ISBN 0312204078. New York, 1998].
2. Aristophanes' The Clouds still inspires, see: Frederick Crewes, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays [ISBN 1593761503. New York, 2007]

Romantic rubbish and de-constructed detritus

Romanticism, the precursor of postmodernism, blazed the trail for this revolt against reason. The scorn of contemporary critics of the "fanciful achievements" of Romanticism is strangely appropriate to postmodernist nonsense:

I do not wish to hide the fact that I can only look with repugnance… upon the puffed-up pretentiousness of all these volumes filled with wisdom, such as are fashionable nowadays. For I am fully satisfied that… the accepted methods must endlessly increase these follies and blunders, and that even the complete annihilation of all these fanciful achievements could not possibly be as harmful as this fictitious science with its accursed fertility.

Immanuel Kant

The character of honesty, that spirit of undertaking an inquiry together with the reader, which permeates the works of all previous philosophers, disappears here completely. Every page witnesses that these so-called philosophers do not attempt to teach, but to bewitch their reader.

Arthur Schopenhauer

— great minds that apparently strove in vain against the legion of mental-midgets. Now, in the academic milieu of "knowledge production":

… narrow canons of proof, evidence, logical consistency and clarity of expression have to go. To insist on them imposes a drag upon progress. Indeed, to apply strict canons of objectivity and evidence in academic publishing today would be comparable to the American economy's returning to the gold standard*; the effect would be the immediate collapse of the system.

Gerald Graff, University of Illinois.

So, throw out the faded and threadbare mottos of the Enlightenment – sapere aude and quære verum – bring in the glossy and new: Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap! Never mind the quality, feel the width!

O brave new world of Knowledge Production – she never stumbles, she's got no place to fall… (with apologies to WS and Bob Dylan).

*

Professor Graff is neither an epistemologist nor an economist – the case for a return to the gold standard is not open to such a facile dismissal, see: The Gold Standard: An Analysis of Some Recent Proposals.

All those intent upon sabotaging the evolution toward welfare, peace, freedom, and democracy loathed the gold standard, and not only on account of its economic significance.

Ludwig von Mises: Human Action

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard…

The classical or orthodox gold standard alone is a truly effective check on the power of the government to inflate the currency. Without such a check all other constitutional safeguards can be rendered vain.

Ludwig von Mises: The Theory of Money and Credit