Thank you very much.

If you could also tell me what you think about the following statement by Gadi Taub, I would greatly appreciate it.

I highlighted in red, below, the central claim; I haven’t seen anyone besides Taub raise this idea: if discourse constructs reality, that means the annihilation of fantasy (which is definitely a term that exists אצל Lacan, p. 84 in Dylan Evans’s dictionary t.ly/McDU )

My question is: do you have any reservation about this statement, or do you agree with it?

Thank you very much.
N.

The Postmodern Attack on the Imagination

We need an alternative to reality; otherwise everything that inspires in human existence will disappear in favor of the educational, the unifying, and the political. What happens when art too turns from psychological release into yet another postmodern burden

24.01.2018 12:47

Gadi Taub

Many devotees of the postmodern position are unaware that for quite some time now they have been trading in counterfeit philosophical currency: the postmodern attack on the concept of truth has turned out to be a clear failure, and the philosophical ground has been pulled out from under the extreme theories of discourse and social construction. But business as usual on the deconstruction exchange continues, and it has causedand continues to causeserious damage to our intellectual world, just as large quantities of counterfeit money can damage an economy (and probably in additional ways that counterfeit money does not).

There is, of course, a measure of irony in this, because the philosophical defense of truth-denying positions tends to point to their consequences, and not to their truthwhich, from a logical standpoint, is impossible. So the questionin the eyes of those who hold these positionsis not supposed to be whether their positions are “correct,” but to what extent they are useful. But even this shift in the discussion does not offer the believers much help, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that the harms of the postmodern position probably outweigh any benefit they hoped to derive from it.

Here I will deal with two out of the many kinds of this damage: the denial of the category of the fictional and the attack on the space of imagination and art; and the transfer of the arena of legitimate argument from the issue itself to the person. In conclusion I will mention, in broad strokes and for those interested in the professional debate among philosophers, how it became clear that the notes were counterfeit, and why philosophy departments generally did not buy the postmodern legend of the “death of truth.”

The Elimination of the Space of Fiction

What gives the postmodern position its aura of daring is directly connected to the denial of truth: our discourse, according to those who hold such positions, indeed purports to describe reality, but in fact constitutes what we think reality is.

Thus we learned to look behind texts that present themselves as scholarly, for the way in which, for example, the Western orientalist “constitutes” himself as subject and the Easterner as the object of his study. We learned to suspect that behind literary works supposedly dealing with universal human experience there is hiding, for example, a construction of the homosexual as the Otherwhat we now call a “heteronormative position.” We also learned how an apparently innocent joke reproduces, for example, relations of gender subordination. And so on, always with abyssal seriousness.

But if discourse constructs reality, then logically the possibility of distinguishing between the two is eliminated. And so the very possibility of a distinct, separate space of imagination is also eliminated. When the gap between the fictional and the real is closed, fantasy, play, and humor too lose the ability to serve as an alternative to the real and become the real itself (or what seems to us to be the real, which for our purposes comes to the same thing). The final result is that art too falls plundered before the boots of didactic crudeness.

Michel Foucault. In his view, truth is an internal function; outside discourse there is no objective test for it. But we need an alternative to the real. It fulfills a basic psychological and spiritual need in human beings. Its absence leaves us maimed. For in the gap between discourse and reality is rooted our ability to examine and recognize the demons in the closet, the fears in the attic, the aggressions, the full spectrum of emotions, and the possibilitiesand the limitsof their release. In the space of imagination, a child can take revenge on the teacher who humiliated him with terrible acts of vengeance without any harm coming to her, or to him, and then return to the course of ordinary life. In a video game he can “kill the bad guys” without harming anyone. Later in life too, in adulthood, we find release and comfort in fiction, fantasy, imagination, and humor. There we touch frightening desires and existential anxieties, and thus we can draw some of their sting. If sexual fantasy ceases to be an arena in which to discover the boundaries of that boundary-breaking which is human sexuality, if there it is impossible to tie and untie the links between desire and aggression, between omnipotent dreams and anxieties, then we bring the whole raw, unprocessed tangle into interpersonal reality itself. If daydreams cease to be a way to recognize the fluidity between love

Hello,
I think attacking postmodernism is a blessing in vain. Bottom line, all these attacks are really just one argument in different shades: if there is no truth, then your claims too are nonsense. Nothing can be claimed. In other words, postmodernism declares a vacuum, but implicitly it assumes quite a few assumptions.
This attack too, which you brought, uses cannons to kill mice. In a world where every discourse is interested construction, there is no art either, and no difference between fiction and truth. Obviouslybut that is because there is no truth and no meaning whatsoever to discussion, including all of this itself. So what is the point of raising such arguments?
What is more correct to do is to describe postmodernism and leave it to the reader to decide.
See columns 178-184 on my site.

It definitely doesn’t depend on talent. Quite a few talented people fall into these regions. Sometimes it seems to me that this happens mainly to talented people. Someone once said (Wilde?) that there are absurdities so great that only intellectuals can say them. It’s completely serious. Sometimes a detached but consistent logical structure, which would make no impression on an ordinary person operating with common sense, will dazzle an intellectual who is prepared to live on a logical plane detached from common sense. Some see this as the essence of intellectuality (I don’t). This applies especially to mathematicians, whose main concern is with consistent theories as suchthat is, validity irrespective of truth and logic.

It’s commonly attributed to George Orwell, but on Wikiquote it says this:
Possibly a paraphrase of Bertrand Russell in My Philosophical Development (1959): “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.” It is similar in meaning to Orwell’s line from Notes on Nationalism (1945): “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” However, Russell was commenting not on politics, as Orwell was, but on some philosophers and their ideas about language.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Misattributed

Many thanks.