Tag Archives: postmodernism

Mario Bunge

Las rebeliones estudiantiles de la década de 1960, en particular el mayo parisién de 1968, habían sido apropiadas por la inexactitud posmoderna. Un paredón blanco en la Universidad de Fráncfort amaneció pintado con la leyenda Lernen macht dumm: “Estudiar atonta”.

En algunos lugares, los bárbaros fueron más lejos: en Buenos Aires defenestraron el microscopio electrónico de Eduardo De Robertis; en Montreal montaron una gran manifestación que exigió la francización de la McGill y al año siguiente incendiaron el centro de cálculo de la Sir George Williams University. Ni en Berkeley, ni en París o Montreal exigieron mejoras académicas, por ejemplo, de los estudios sociales. Se proponían hacer ruido, no luz.

Mario Bunge, Memorias entre dos mundos, Barcelona, 2014, p. 204

Geoffrey Miller

In recent years much nonsense has been written by post-modern theorists such as Michel Foucault about the “social construction of the body,” as if human bodies were the incarnation of cultural norms rather than ancestral sexual preferences. These theorists should go to the zoo more often. What they consider a “radical reshaping” of the human body through social pressure is trivial compared to evolution’s power. Evolution can transform a dinosaur into an albatross, a four-legged mammal into a sperm whale, and a tiny, bulgy-eyed, tree-hugging, insect-crunching proto-primate into Julia Roberts—or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Selection is vastly more powerful than any cosmetic surgeon or cultural norm. Minds may be sponges for soaking up culture, but bodies are not.

Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, New York, 2000, p. 255

Peter Grosvenor

T]he intellectual left is likely to be the prime beneficiary if the social sciences and the humanities can be rescued from residual Marxism and obscurantist postmodernism.

Peter Grosvenor, ‘Evolutionary Psychology and the Intellectual Left’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 45, no. 3 (Summer, 2002), p. 446

Edward Herman

An important element of the intellectual trend called “postmodernism” is the repudiation of global models of social analysis and global solutions, and their replacement with a focus on local and group differences and the ways in which ordinary individuals adapt to and help reshape their environments. Its proponents often present themselves as populists, hostile to the elitism of modernists, who, on the basis of “essentialist” and “totalizing” theories, suggest that ordinary people are being manipulated and victimized on an unlevel playing field. […] In an academic context, the focus on individual responses and micro-issues of language, text interpretation, and ethnic and gender identity is politically safe and holds forth the possibility of endless deconstructions of small points in a growing framework of technical jargon. The process has been a long-standing one in economics, where mathematics opened up wonderful opportunities for building complex gothic structures on the foundation of very unrealistic assumptions. These models have slight application to reality, but conveniently tend to reaffirm the marvels of the free market, given their simple assumptions of perfect competition, etc. […] It is good to see that the active audience intellectuals are as useful in serving the cause of the “free flow” of information as the mainstream economists are in helping along “free trade.”

Edward Herman, ‘Postmodernism Triumphs’, Z Magazine, January 1996

Horacio González

Demasiadas veces se escucha hablar de ‘postmoderno’ sólo para proponer un neoliberalismo despolitizador, que pretende superar ‘viejas izquierdas y derechas’ pero apenas hace del político una figura destinada a decir con énfasis que nadie debe hacerse ilusiones.

Horacio González, Unidos, no. 9

Ernesto Garzón Valdés

[Lo dicho no] es una aceptación de la ironía moral de sesgo rortiano-posmodernista. Después del holocausto, de la ignominia del terrorismo de Estado impuesto en Argentina por Videla y sus secuaces, de las tragedias colectivas provocadas por el regionalismo nacionalista en la Europa finisecular y ante la injusticia institucionalizada que padece buena parte de la población de nuestra América, la ironía moral es sólo obsceno cinismo.

Ernesto Garzón Valdés, Instituciones suicidas: estudios de ética y política, México, 2000, p. 208

Alan Sokal

I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.

Alan Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword’, in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York, 1998, p. 269