The category of postmodernism I spend the most time engaging with (as a historian of science/STS person) is not so much the construction of identity, which I take as sort of a given (it's pretty obvious that national identities are constructed ideas or imagined communities, and it doesn't take much more to go from there to racial identities, gender identities, etc.), but on the broader question of what it means to be a "fact" when you lack a "solid" reference point. As a historian of science this is always tricky because even the things that some other historians might like to occasionally reference as "givens" (like, "atoms are real") are things that we tend to argue are also somewhat constructed (what does "real" mean in this statement?).

The epistemology I find most useful in my day to day work is Bruno Latour's as described in his We Have Never Been Modern, which basically articulates facts as nodes in networks that need to be continually reinforced as refreshed in their early days of establishment, but at some point become so enmeshed in the network (and future networks) that they become almost invisible and taken for granted (until something comes along and reinterprets the network relationships).

So for example, one of the examples that Latour discusses is that of Boyle's air pump and the establishment of the idea of a vacuum (which itself is borrowed from Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump). Robert Boyle (the 17th century Irish natural philosopher/chemyst) created a new tool (the "air-pump," what we would today call a vacuum pump) that he believed could deploy a kind of mechanical objectivity to create new natural philosophical facts. There was considerable debate in his time as to what exactly was happening when you used it — was it really leaving a vacuum behind in the chamber, or was it doing something else? For Latour, the key thing here is that to establish the idea that the vacuum was real, you needed a whole lot of things to be working together. First you needed Boyle to actually do quite a lot of not only the creation of the device but the writing that disseminated information about it and interpreted it (as Latour puts it, facts always require "spokesmen," as they cannot speak for themselves and certainly do not write themselves). You need the pump itself (for Latour, non-human actors are members of the network) — you need it to behave correctly (a non-trivial difficulty), you need it to actually work as it is supposed to. You need the other people, Boyle's gentleman witnesses, to attest to it doing what Boyle says it does, because replication was largely impossible (there were only five or six air-pumps in all of Europe over that time period, and they were finicky and not easy to access). You needed Boyle's compelling explanations of existing phenomena that other natural philosophers were interested in (e.g. the Torricelli experiment). You need Boyle's access to a printing press and the dissemination of the information. And so on.

In the earliest days of establishing the idea of the vacuum, the network was pretty weak — vulnerable in places. Do you really trust Boyle's gentleman witnesses? How about people who tried to replicate the work but failed, because their pumps didn't work quite like Boyle's? And there were those (like Thomas Hobbes) who attacked Boyle's claims, dissecting nodes in the network (like Boyle's interpretation of the data).

But over time, with more and more refinement of the tools, and more and more incorporation of the ideas into other models of the world, the idea of the vacuum moved from being a very weakly established fact, to a very strongly established one. It never crossed some magic line and went from "non-fact" to "fact," as a more modernist, positivist epistemology might have it. Rather its "factiness" was built up over repeated strengthening of the network, to the degree that to question whether a vacuum exists became completely absurd — to do so, you'd be questioning a fundamental, "easy to demonstrate" matter of the world.

We might contrast this "fact" to the idea of the luminferous aether, which was built up with a very robust network in the 19th century. But in the end, its network collapsed: certain instruments stopped cooperating (e.g., the Michelson-Morley experiment, where Michelson's interferometer stubbornly refused to show aether drift, no matter how much he tried to coax it into cooperation), various theoretical models stopped requiring it, and finally it found itself not so much overthrown as dissipated. Einstein rejected it, sure, but the aether really fell out of favor because no networks kept requiring it — it became superfluous more than it was proven wrong. Without correspondence to a network, it just vanished out of "fact."

What I like about this approach is that while it never really enshrines "truth" as some kind of simple, binary, yes/no status, it also doesn't make it seem like it's totally up for grabs by anyone. It doesn't make it entirely a human process (the non-human actors are very important, and don't always obey!), but it also doesn't pretend like "nature" is some kind of easy category to observe, much less some kind of actor that can speak for itself.

Which is to say, it seems to preserve the best aspects of the postmodern critique, without falling into the pit of sophism or arbitrariness. It allows us to say, for example, that some ideas or facts have more support than others, and have a good, solid definition of "support" (the network). It also helps us understand what undermining a fact means (you are attacking the network) in terms that have better historical and frankly practical use that simple notions of proving something "right" or "wrong."

You can take this model and apply it to the other categories mentioned earlier, like, say, nationality and race. You can identify the actors, the network, the nodes, from which these concepts pop out. And it also emphasizes that while, say, nationality or race are "constructed" (as is everything in the network, including each and every node that makes up a given network), they can still be as "real" in their effects as anything else.

An additional advantage to this epistemology, as a methodology, is that it makes the job of the historian quite clear: show the development, change, dissolution, etc. of the network over time, and you are doing quite interesting history.

Anyway. Just some stray thoughts. I find this kind of approach gets me more "use value" than either the modernist ("facts are real, you just discover them!") and postmodernist ("everything is just stories, man!"*) approaches. It is also incidentally mostly compatible with both: you end up redefining facts in ways that either, I think, could live with, preserving both the "hard" quality of facts that modernists like, yet emphasizing the constructedness that postmodernists like.

* Actual quote from a colleague who self-describes as a postmodernist.

As /u/commiespaceinvader pointed out to me while we were discussing the podcast, I am perhaps a bit unfair to Fukuyama in how I discuss him. If you have read The End of History (PDF article-version of his longer book) then you know that he arguing for an essentially Wiggish or Marxian/Hegalian version of history that has reached it's end in the liberal democracies and post-War peace of the 1990s. (of course, the farther we get away from the summer of 89, the less likely we realize that things haven't really reached an End).

In the podcast, it sounds a bit like I am eliding that and attributing views to Fukuyama that are not his own -- Fukuyama isn't arguing along the same lines as Foucault and others are, that there is never an end to history, that everything is relative and purposeless. However, my larger point is that Fukuyama is an example of a type of postmodern history that I very strongly dislike (along with the Focauldians!) and I view as partially responsible for the current rut that the field humanities finds itself in -- a narcissistic philosophic indolence.

I had a good time listening to this bonus episode while making my tea this evening. Three things especially came to mind - power, incommensurability and the defence of truth.

The one thing I thought was really missing from the podcast discussion was power. To me, at least from my reading of Foucault, a central point of postmodernism is how discourse is an exercise and reinforcement of power.

At the extreme, we're completely enmeshed in these systems of power, and in even attempting to challenge them we tend to validate them or give them power by speaking their language and participating in their systems. To take an example, the recent Monday Methods Is Research Value Neutral? written by /u/snapshot52 makes a case for more diversity in academia, more indigenous perspectives and narratives. But what if these just strengthen the institutions or discourses that excluded them in the first place? If they're co-opted for a dominant power structure? Or a new way for indigenous cultures to open themselves up for examination and dissection? If you decide to avoid this by staying out of the dominant discourse, how do you avoid just being marginalised?

That's an extreme and pessimistic perspective, but I believe it's one that can come out of Foucault and postmodernism. I don't know if he offers an escape, but as I understand it, that didn't stop him (and other postmodernists) from being politically and socially engaged intellectuals - I'm not sure the charge of "narcissistic philosophic indolence" is fair, at least in this case.

That Monday methods thread is also relevant to something /u/TenMinuteHistory says in the podcast, about everyone having their own history. There's a concept in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions of incommensurability. When a new paradigm comes along you can't simply look at the answers it gives to question and declare it better. The new paradigm uses different concepts so it can't be understood or compared in the terms of the old one; putting it against the old one is a bit like arguing in mutually incomprehensible languages (perhaps related language that share some words and grammar... but now I'm stretching the metaphor...).

You can extend this concept to how we view of the past. Can we really comprehend, say, what "equality" meant to a 17th century Leveller, or the experience of a Tang era merchant? Do we just impose our own concepts and ideas on to them? (Less of a conversation with the past, more of an exercise of power over it - or perhaps the use of it to exercise power in the present.) There's an essay by Errol Morris about the time Thomas Kuhn (allegedly) threw an ashtray at him. In this, Morris asks the question:

“If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’”

Lastly, there was a thread posted by /u/King_Pyrrhus a while back - I thought it was recently, but turns out it was five months ago - "Is it a historian's duty to tell the truth?" There were some thoughtful and nuanced answers in there, not least from /u/TenMinuteHistory talking about how it's hard to say there is a definitive truth, we can give multiple meanings and interpretations, but we need to base them on evidence.

However, given the current climate, I was surprised not to see a more robust defence of truth-telling. If we flipped the question around - "is it (part of) a historian's duty not to lie?" - would the starting point be "of course"? Or if we removed the definite article and made it "is it a historian's duty to tell truth(s)?"

This seems both a good and a bad thing. A good thing in that perhaps within academic history the standards are high enough that we can have nuanced debated about epistemology without losing sight of the basic need for evidence and honesty. A bad thing because these values are being attacked and we need to be able to defend them robustly, clearly and effectively. How do we translate the academic discussion into one a wider range of people can grasp?

That's particularly hard with postmodernism, which is can be an especially complex and counter-intuitive set of theories, and one with serious unresolved problems (sometimes I wonder if the complexity is deliberate, to hide the gaps in the arguments (eg. contrast Foucault, who is tricky but I always feel is trying to be precise, with Baudrillard, who feels very shifty)).

Kudos to both /u/AnnalsPornographie and /u/TenMinuteHistory for doing their best to make this difficult subject comprehensible, while also thinking on the spot.

Post-modernism as advanced by theories of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and others holds (simply put) that categories such as ethnicity, nationality, gender, and culture are not eternal, unchanging, and natural but are the result of the process of social construction. What this means is that these things do not exist divorced from the way we talk about them, how we describe them. How we describe culture, nationality, ethnicity, gender constructs them in the first place – and they only exist in relation to how we describe them.

I'm not a professional historian so I hope it's okay if I jump in here.

I'm a bit surprised, I thought post-modernism, in this sense here, of a dichotomy between "natural" and "socially-constructed", had been disproved, or at least it was evident it was often a lot more complex than that. Eg: gender. Both the sad case of David Reimer, the boy who was raised as a girl following a botched circumcision, and those of a number of trans people, who despite everything society told them (and often still does), still strongly feel their bodies mismatch their true gender, are hard to explain in the paradigm you describe. It seems now (as opposed to in the 1960s and 1970s) gender is like the distinction between childhood and adulthood - while the exact boundary is socially constructed (eg first period/18th birthday/etc), there is a natural distinction there (the differences between 3 year olds and 30 year olds are not purely down to how we talk about them.)

Or take culture. I have a New Zealand accent. This is culturally determined. But is it really that the NZ accent exists only in relation to how people describe the accent? Or did the accent come first, and only then people started describing it? The European settlement of New Zealand is fairly well-documented, and I don't recall anyone writing or talking about a New Zealand accent until they started reacting to its existence (in horror.) And, while linguists may be able to describe accents very precisely these days, do accents really only exist in relation to how we describe them? If all technical linguistic knowledge was lost, would accents start to mush together?

And so on with many other cultural differences: in NZ people drive on the left and, in crowded spaces, walk on the left. In London people drive on the left but walk on the right. Does this cultural difference exist only because we describe it, or because if you break the local rule you'll have a frustrating time of it even if you never say a word?

Obviously there are some things that are not natural, and are entirely socially constructed, eg nationality. But I thought these strong claims about gender and culture were now generally accepted as, at the best, problematic.