Distinguishing framework from framer: postmodernism, Rashomon, and more

In the past, I've been pretty skeptical bordering on hostile to the different studies departments which have come to infest academia these days. That hostility dribbled over to some of the tools and concepts they use, and in hindsight, I see that was due to either intellectual laziness or blindness. Mea culpa.

In my defense, when I first looked into intersectionality, I thought it unremarkable. If I remember the story right, it went something like this: if you have a certain number of women and a certain number of black folks, you may still not have a certain number of black women and so something may be amiss. Our identities are formed at the intersection of many differing identities. Something like that and so far, so good. But when it devolves into oppression hierarchies and oppression Olympics, the utility diminishes beyond zero to become destructive. So, I was more skeptical of its use than its foundations from the get go. No so much with postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a much larger set of frameworks and concepts the details of which I won't get into here. There is a cavalcade of po-mo poltroons whose over-the-top idiocy, sloppy thinking, amorality, appalling behavior, misplaced relativism and innumerable other traits and activities had me dismiss postmodernism out of hand. I will confess that some groupthink made that easier, inspired in part, by an absolutely epic rant by Camille Paglia. Hostility to postmodernism is widespread and contagious. It can be cured however, with a generous dose of Nick Gillispe. Levi Russell aka Farmer Hayek helps in the recovery, too.

So I've moderated my opinion on postmodernism, intersectionality, etc as schools of thought but not so much on many of the pseudo-academics who use them. If, in the spirit of friendship offer some bacon to someone who I don't know keeps kosher, a third party watching the offer might see it as generous, I may be trying to keep it from going to waste, and the person looking at the bacon may see a grievous insult. This yields to a postmodern analysis where there are multiple valid truths which depend on perspective. It is, in part, why Rashomon is such a good movie, though I would bet that 99.9% (or more!) of all intersectional feminists absolutely hate it. Or would hate it if they every watched it.

Similarly, there is nothing essentially wrong from studying sociology, economics, history, physics, whatever, from a particular perspective. Where I things run off the rails, IMO, is when the perspective becomes the discipline. It's not there isn't something there, but that (via intersectionality!) it is necessarily unique. The degree to which there is overlap in perspectives between people of some given category can't be known, much less quantified. So, rather than a queer studies department, it would be better, IMO, to have queer folks bringing their individual perspectives to sociology, economics, history, physics, whatever. Lather rinse repeat all other group for which there's a studies department.

Even in the hard sciences, scientists disagree. But across the spectrum of sciences and other academic departments, there are foundational agreements. What the original Sokal affair and Sokal Squared has shown that there are some departments of academia where there is no foundation at all. There is a difference between seeing something as legitimate and at the same time wrong and having no common basis for legitimacy.