After postmodernism | Hilary Lawson, Robin van den Akker, Abby Innes, Sophie Scott-Brown
Summary
This episode of Philosophy For Our Times features a panel discussion with philosopher Hilary Lawson, cultural philosopher Robin van den Akker, and political economist Abby Innes, hosted by Sophie Scott-Brown. The central question is whether there are viable alternatives to postmodernism that do not simply revert to a belief in universal, objective truth.
The conversation begins with Robin van den Akker situating postmodernism as a cultural logic corresponding to a specific stage of capitalist development. He introduces metamodernism as the current cultural moment that follows postmodernism, characterized by a renewed need for truth claims and certainties within a polarized political landscape. Abby Innes then critiques neoclassical economics as a form of ‘high modernism’—a utopian, universalizing science built on metaphorical foundations that fails to account for the contingent, interpretive nature of the social world. She draws parallels between neoliberal and Soviet economic planning, arguing both are based on a flawed ‘copy theory of knowledge’.
Hilary Lawson argues that the philosophical project of the last few centuries—trying to show how knowledge of an objective world is possible—has failed. Instead, we must start from the position that knowledge, in the traditional realist sense, is not possible. He proposes his ‘closure theory,’ where we do not describe a pre-differentiated world but actively ‘close’ an open, undifferentiated reality through frameworks and metaphors that allow us to intervene effectively. Our theories are not truths but refined metaphors we judge by their practical efficacy.
The discussion then grapples with the social and political implications of these philosophical positions. The panelists agree that the dominant neoliberal ‘metaphor’ or framework has derailed, leading to crises of inequality, precarity, and climate destruction. This creates a pressing need for new narratives and closures. A key tension emerges between the intellectual acceptance of uncertainty and provisionality and the political need for actionable narratives to address tangible problems. The episode concludes with a warning against those who claim to have discovered the final truth, advocating instead for a renewed commitment to empiricism and rationalism as tools for refining our models, while abandoning the notion that they lead to ultimate truth.
Recommendations
Books
- Late Soviet Britain — Abby Innes’s book, which suggests Britain’s political and economic downfall mirrors that of the Soviet Union, drawing parallels between neoliberal and Soviet statecraft.
Concepts
- Metamodernism — Described by Robin van den Akker as the current cultural logic that comes after postmodernism, characterized by a renewed need for truth claims and certainties within late modernity.
- Closure Theory — Hilary Lawson’s philosophical theory proposing that we do not describe a pre-differentiated world, but actively ‘close’ an open, undifferentiated reality through frameworks and metaphors that enable intervention.
- Neoclassical Economics — Critiqued by Abby Innes as a ‘high modernist’ utopian project that borrowed metaphors from physics to create a universal, abistorical science based on the rational economic man, underpinning neoliberal policy.
People
- Jacques Derrida — Referenced as a key postmodern thinker associated with the attack on objective truth and the idea of undecidable meaning.
- Jean-François Lyotard — Mentioned for his report on knowledge and the postmodern condition, describing an ‘archipelago of epistemic islands.’
- Herman Daly — Cited by Abby Innes for the ‘fundamental truth’ that ‘the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature,’ a potential grounding principle for new economic narratives.
Topic Timeline
- 00:03:27 — Robin van den Akker redefines the question of postmodernism — Robin clarifies he is not a ‘metamodernist’ but a scholar analyzing metamodernism as the current cultural logic following postmodernism. He situates postmodern philosophy within a specific stage of capitalist development, arguing we are now in a different moment that creates a renewed need for truth claims and certainties, visible in polarized populist politics.
- 00:08:21 — Abby Innes critiques neoclassical economics as high modernism — Innes argues that in economic terms, we never reached postmodernism but are stuck in a ‘high modernist’ age of neoclassical economics. She explains how it borrowed metaphors from Newtonian physics to create a universal ‘science’ based on the rational economic man. This utopian framework, which underpins neoliberal policy, ignores the contingent, interpretive nature of the social world and has led to a series of unpleasant surprises, mirroring the failures of Soviet planning.
- 00:14:17 — Hilary Lawson proposes moving beyond the search for objective truth — Lawson argues we must accept that knowledge of an objective world is not possible, moving beyond the Enlightenment project. He proposes his ‘closure theory’: we don’t describe reality but ‘close’ an open, undifferentiated world through frameworks and metaphors (like a neuron firing). Our accounts are metaphors for intervention, which we can refine and judge for their effectiveness, not their truth.
- 00:27:00 — The historical urgency behind moving beyond postmodernism — Robin argues the question of ‘after postmodernism’ is urgent now because the dominant neoliberal ‘metaphor’ has derailed, creating a ‘clusterfuck’ of inequality, precarity, and climate destruction. Our ‘epistemological islands’ no longer feel comfortable, forcing us to seek new frameworks or ‘closures’ to grapple with these world-historical problems. This moment of transition is what’s at stake.
- 00:36:03 — The aesthetic ‘as-if’ style of new truth claims — Robin describes the current style of holding the world as ‘aesthetic,’ using a Kantian ‘as-if’ logic. We mobilize truth claims knowing they are not ultimate truth, but because they have a function for engaging with the world. This mingling of fact and fiction, seen in post-truth debates, is a different style than the rationalist utopianism of homo economicus and neoclassical economics.
- 00:41:08 — Final thoughts on truth, models, and empiricism — Hilary warns against anyone claiming to have worked out the truth for changing the world. He argues the solution to our crisis is not to abandon Enlightenment tools but to repurpose them: we must use empiricism and rationalism to test and improve our models or ‘closures,’ while giving up the idea they lead to objective truth. Every model will fail because it is not the world itself, but a way of holding it.
Episode Info
- Podcast: Philosophy For Our Times
- Author: IAI
- Category: Society & Culture Philosophy
- Published: 2025-10-10T10:00:00Z
- Duration: 00:47:13
References
- URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/91d0f4a0-585b-0134-cf69-7b84bf375f4c/episode/fecfa8dd-58ca-481e-b42b-27e8488eb159/
- Episode UUID: fecfa8dd-58ca-481e-b42b-27e8488eb159
Podcast Info
- Name: Philosophy For Our Times
- Type: episodic
- Site: https://art19.com/shows/philosophy-for-our-times
- UUID: 91d0f4a0-585b-0134-cf69-7b84bf375f4c
Transcript
[00:00:00] Everyone who’s got a view about how to change the world will tell you that they’ve worked out the
[00:00:06] truth and be very careful of every one of them.
[00:00:15] Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world’s leading thinkers on
[00:00:20] today’s biggest ideas. It’s Ed here. And Avi. And today’s episode is After Postmodernism,
[00:00:27] featuring Avi Innes, Hilary Lawson, Robin van der Acker, and hosted by Sophie Scott-Brown.
[00:00:34] So Avi, what can we expect from this podcast? In this episode, we’ve got three fantastic
[00:00:40] speakers who go into postmodernism or interrogating it from very different perspectives.
[00:00:47] So expect postmodernism to be turned on its head and the terms to be questioned and reality itself
[00:00:56] to be questioned.
[00:00:58] All in all, postmodernism is challenged in a very postmodernist way.
[00:01:03] So yeah, we’ve got two philosophers in Hilary and Robin and one political economist in Avi.
[00:01:09] So let’s get to it and see what they have to say.
[00:01:12] Hello, good afternoon, everyone, and a very warm welcome to you. We’ve got a great debate for you
[00:01:18] this afternoon. So let’s crack on into it. Hugely influential in the latter decades of the 20th
[00:01:25] century, postmodernism.
[00:01:27] It transformed many academic disciplines and culture at large. Associated with an attack
[00:01:33] on objective truth and the uniqueness of meaning, it called into question the whole edifice
[00:01:38] of knowledge which Western culture had previously glorified. But it left many lost. And in
[00:01:44] the wake of a polarizing post-truth world, there is a widespread recognition that we
[00:01:50] need to move on. Feminist and post-colonial critics, though, claim there is a danger
[00:01:55] that instead we risk retreating to the culture of the past. So let’s get to it.
[00:01:57] Questionable certainties of the past. Are there viable alternatives to postmodernism that are not
[00:02:03] simply a return to a belief in universal truth? Are metamodernism or model-theoretic realism
[00:02:10] possible ways forward? I hope we find out. Or is the chaos initiated by postmodernism
[00:02:16] so profound that the only credible approach is to return to the Enlightenment notion
[00:02:21] that we can arrive at the objective truth? Okay, so a huge topic for us this afternoon.
[00:02:27] And help us with that, please meet our speakers. Firstly, we have Robin van der Ecke, who is
[00:02:34] a senior lecturer in the philosophy of culture. He is a leading scholar of metamodernism and
[00:02:39] founding editor of Notes on Metamodernism. We also have Abbie Innes, who is an associate
[00:02:45] professor of political economy at the LSE. Her latest book, Late Soviet Britain, suggests
[00:02:50] our downfall mirrors the Soviet Union’s. And finally, Hilary Lawson is a philosopher
[00:02:55] best known for his theory, Cloverfield.
[00:02:57] She is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, and she is also a professor of
[00:03:02] philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is also a professor of philosophy at the University
[00:03:05] of Oxford.
[00:03:06] Okay, so great panel, great lineup, exciting topic. So I’m sure most of you are familiar
[00:03:10] with the approach by now. We’re going to start by hearing a bit from each of the speakers
[00:03:15] who are going to be answering the provocation. Are there viable alternatives to postmodernism
[00:03:20] that are not simply a return to a belief in universal truth? And I’m going to invite
[00:03:25] Robin.
[00:03:26] Would you like to start us off, please?
[00:03:27] Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much for the invitation, and great to be here in this
[00:03:32] very warm tent. Yeah, I’m a philosopher, and I hope that you forgive me for taking
[00:03:41] a bit of an anarchistic moment and redefine a little bit the question and some of the
[00:03:47] presumptions here. Yes, I’m a scholar that works on metamodernism, but I’m not a metamodernist.
[00:03:55] I’m not representing a movement.
[00:03:56] I’m not representing a movement or writing manifestos or whatnot. For me, metamodernism
[00:04:01] is a moment in culture, the current moment in culture, that comes after postmodernism
[00:04:05] as a cultural logic. And indeed, the philosophical strength labeled postmodernism is just that.
[00:04:14] It’s a philosophical school thought, including poststructuralism, for instance. That philosophical
[00:04:20] school for me, I’m working in a materialist tradition.
[00:04:26] Some would call me a cultural Marxist. Yeah, I take the compliment. Thank you.
[00:04:34] That philosophical school in itself was not operating in a vacuum. That was, that is corresponding
[00:04:40] to a certain stage in the development of Western, we now say the Global North, Western capitalist
[00:04:47] societies. And in that school, indeed, you see an attack on universal truth claims.
[00:04:53] Derrida would call it the white terror of truth, for instance.
[00:04:56] You see an emphasis on fragmentation. Lyotard, in his report on knowledge and the postmodern
[00:05:04] condition, writes about an archipelago of epistemic islands, he calls it, that can
[00:05:10] all coexist alongside each other. Yes, that is true. I don’t always have to add, but
[00:05:18] only as long as much as they help reproducing the capitalist logic that is sort of overarching
[00:05:23] all those epistemological islands.
[00:05:26] We are now in a different moment, a different moment of capitalism. And indeed, we see
[00:05:33] in this moment the needs, the renewed needs, you could say, for new truth claims, new certainties
[00:05:41] that sometimes aspire to be, to become universal. And there is indeed a danger there. That is
[00:05:49] something that we have learned under postmodernism, that it is dangerous to aspire to those universal
[00:05:55] truth claims.
[00:05:56] Nonetheless, it’s also simply what we call politics. For thinkers like Laclau and Mouffe,
[00:06:05] politics is raising some kind of particular to the level of the universal by simply claiming
[00:06:12] that it’s true, right? And within a chain of equivalence, you build some kind of coalition.
[00:06:20] You can call it populism. Again, that’s just politics. Some kind of coalition that claims
[00:06:24] to speak for the people.
[00:06:26] And claims to speak the truth for and about the people. It’s also something that we
[00:06:32] simply see happening. And that is how I use the word metamodernism. We’re living in
[00:06:38] a certain moment in time with a certain cultural logic that is metamodernist. And the universal
[00:06:44] truth claims can be located in the polarized, heated debates that we see among, for instance,
[00:06:53] authoritarian right-wing populism.
[00:06:54] And a left-wing populist. And a left-wing populist. And a left-wing populist. And a
[00:06:55] left-wing populist. And a left-wing populist. And a left-wing populist. And a left-wing populist.
[00:06:56] This is populism that is sadly missing and is leaving the cultural terrain to the fascists.
[00:07:03] That was my mistake.
[00:07:05] Robin, thank you. Could I just ask just very briefly, in a couple
[00:07:11] of sentences, just cause I think it’ll be helpful later on. Metamodernism, sorry, like
[00:07:16] just can you clarify. What to you is metamodern, modernism?
[00:07:19] For us, it’s a very descriptive term that we used to denote that capitalism has reconfirmed
[00:07:25] and is becoming popular.
[00:07:25] For us, it’s a very descriptive term that we used to denote that capitalism has reconfirmed
[00:07:26] covered what we call metabolism.
[00:07:26] reconfigured itself, is reconfiguring itself, I think you will also have a lot to say about
[00:07:32] that.
[00:07:34] And there is a corresponding cultural logic that is metamodernism, and it’s modernist
[00:07:40] because we’re still in modernity, as it were, late modernity, I would describe it.
[00:07:48] So it’s a culture that can be situated in modern contemporary societies, and meta simply
[00:07:56] means post.
[00:07:58] If you would speak to a Greek person, they have always been using metamodernism to describe
[00:08:04] postmodernism because it simply means post.
[00:08:07] So for us it’s just stating that we have a new cultural logic that emerged from postmodernism
[00:08:15] and historically should be situated after postmodernism.
[00:08:18] Okay.
[00:08:18] Brilliant, thank you.
[00:08:19] Abbey, can we turn to you?
[00:08:21] So hello, thanks for coming out.
[00:08:23] I think it’s interesting that from quite different analytical backgrounds, there’s going to be
[00:08:26] quite a lot of convergence I think in where we get to.
[00:08:30] So I was struck by the title, after postmodernism, because I was thinking but in economic terms
[00:08:36] we haven’t got to the postmodern.
[00:08:37] We’re still living in a high modernist age of neoclassical economic analysis, right?
[00:08:43] That the neoclassical aspiration and neoclassical economics underpins neoliberal
[00:08:48] economic policy. It’s the analytical foundation behind active neoliberal policy. The neoclassical
[00:08:56] economic turn at the beginning of the 20th century was an attempt to basically become a
[00:09:02] hard universal analytical science like physics. So it literally borrowed, it took Newtonian
[00:09:09] mechanics and the metaphors from Newtonian mechanics like equilibrium. And it said, okay,
[00:09:14] if we cut and paste, if we take out energy and swap in utility, we can come up with this kind of
[00:09:21] universal economic man who, if he always has one kind of motivation, he’s this rational calculating
[00:09:29] cost-benefit maximizing individual, then we can have a science of how man navigates commodity
[00:09:35] space. And we can look at all these different spaces where he does that and create these models
[00:09:39] of how he’ll behave given a certain stimulus, what will be the kind of linear, you know, the
[00:09:44] singular.
[00:09:44] Reaction he can have to it. So that it’s an extraordinary moment because physicists at the
[00:09:49] time said, that doesn’t really work because we have natural laws underpinning our use of that
[00:09:56] mathematics. What do you have? And the answer was nothing. We’re borrowing the mathematics because
[00:10:02] it’s the way we could cut out empirical noise and come up with a universal science that is
[00:10:07] good for all times and places. So it’s an extraordinary sort of misadventure in high
[00:10:11] modernism really, because for a social world,
[00:10:14] that the history of philosophy of science would tell you is always becoming something else that is made up of
[00:10:22] people who are generous, vulnerable and fallible and have imagination and are a problem for social
[00:10:28] scientists because we’re always trying to interpret the social world, but we’re interpreting people who are also
[00:10:33] interpreting themselves and reinterpreting themselves. So there’s always this ultimate contingency in social
[00:10:38] science. All of that out the window. No, no, no. We have a governing science that is good for all times and places, and we can
[00:10:44] build institutions according to the logic of that science, which is relentlessly pro free market, because basically the idea is if the state
[00:10:53] withdraws, then the basically man will be free to navigate commodity space without the interference of a mediating state,
[00:11:05] without the distortions in the coordinating properties of the price mechanism. So critical mainstream
[00:11:14] classical economics is not nearly as metaphysically neutral as it claims to be. So when economists talk about market
[00:11:19] failures, what they’re really meaning is, so they use the perfectly competitive market and the perfectly informed superhuman
[00:11:28] person who navigates that space and they say, no, no, no, that’s unrealistic. So let’s think about where people lack
[00:11:35] information or where markets may tend to fail, missing markets, missing information, asymmetries in information. And the
[00:11:42] role of public policy,
[00:11:44] if you’re
[00:11:44] a Blairite and you take on neoclassical, second best world neoclassical economics, is to mend the market failures, use the state to mend the market
[00:11:51] failures. So we have this whole ontology and epistemology of economics that underpins public policy, which says the maximal role of the
[00:12:00] state is mending market failures on the presumption that when you do that, the market will tend to approach the horizon of perfect
[00:12:08] competition and perfect information or coordination. And the point I make in my book is this is the mirror image of actually
[00:12:14] of Stalinist economics, where the state is the perfect sorting mechanism, the perfect informational sorting mechanism. And the dark
[00:12:21] historical joke, which is on us, is that if you believe you live in a computable world, and you want to make government conformed to a
[00:12:28] computable world so that it can be efficient, you converge on the same statecraft. So neoliberals and Soviet economists live in
[00:12:35] a world of quantification, output planning, target setting, purely rational enterprises, who, given the freedom to abide by their own
[00:12:44] own consciousness will only be system completing and system conforming part of productive social
[00:12:50] welfare and like the soviets what we create is a grotesque caricature of the promises of the theory
[00:12:57] because we live in a world that is not a closed system it is not a machine it is not a sociologically
[00:13:05] flat space it’s an open and evolving system which i will round up by getting to robin
[00:13:11] means that like late soviet politics we’re in a world where political speech no longer corresponds
[00:13:20] to socioeconomic reality and in order to reconnect it you would have to recant the underlying
[00:13:27] form of economic analysis that you use and that could take us back to the scientific method that’s
[00:13:34] where i think we ought to go which would be one of observation critical theorization and review
[00:13:39] with social
[00:13:41] political
[00:13:41] purpose added on top of that which is what post-war political economy looked like so we went
[00:13:47] from a world of the scientific method and social purpose within the limits of that in the social
[00:13:56] sciences to a materialist utopian economics that is really a secular theology pretending to be a
[00:14:04] science and we’re now living out the consequences of that and i shall stop there excellent i think
[00:14:09] we’re going to come back to several of those points
[00:14:11] um hillary we’ve heard from um robin and and abby and they seem to be treating post-modernism
[00:14:17] actually quite a specific tangible historical moment that produces certain logics could you
[00:14:22] maybe steer us back to the kind of philosophical aspect element on this what would you say back to
[00:14:29] this thank you sophie so while i’d accept this uh that you know there’s plenty of uh realism still
[00:14:37] around in in uh all sorts of aspects but i think it’s a very important point and i think it’s a very
[00:14:41] important point and i think it’s a very important point and i think it’s a very important point
[00:14:41] of culture um and i’ve spent quite a lot of time in my career arguing against realist
[00:14:47] it does seem to me we moved on from that at some more intellectual level and that uh in large part
[00:14:55] people have accepted the notion that we operate within any given perspective that there isn’t
[00:15:02] a way of arriving at an ultimate perspective and in some sense i understand by post-modernism
[00:15:10] that idea
[00:15:11] i see post i associate post-modern i suppose the the the uh high point of view as being as being
[00:15:18] derrida and a description of the world which is in terms of uh there is no objective truth
[00:15:25] and indeed he went further there’s no decidable meaning we can never get to the bottom of what
[00:15:31] any individual thing means and i think there’s a problem with this uh uh way of going about it i
[00:15:37] think we certainly need an alternative because he’s left many of us very lost in the middle of
[00:15:41] lost you know how could we be in a situation in which there’s a profusion of alternative accounts
[00:15:47] of the world out there we apparently have no way of being able to identify uh what’s ultimately
[00:15:53] going on and what’s more we can’t even say what we’re going on and in that sense i think we have
[00:15:58] to move on from post-modernism whether the position i take up is metamodernist or not i
[00:16:04] don’t know it depends on how you interpret it but so i think we have to move on and the question is
[00:16:11] how do we do that and i think that the history of uh modern philosophy has really been about
[00:16:20] trying to show how knowledge is possible and that’s because you know go back 300 years the
[00:16:25] enlightenment came along and it was the idea that humans could discover knowledge uh previously it
[00:16:31] was a a sort of given from on high on a tablet of stone and so philosophers um like this idea of
[00:16:39] uncovering knowledge is part of the idea of how we can discover knowledge and i think that’s
[00:16:41] where the enlightenment story ends where they spent their time trying to show how knowledge was
[00:16:44] possible but i think what’s happened the irony is we’ve uncovered the fact that knowledge isn’t
[00:16:51] possible and we’ve uncovered it because we’ve identified that different organisms different
[00:16:56] animals sense the world utterly different from us they have completely different ways of framing
[00:17:01] uh the world different cultures have different languages they divide the world in different
[00:17:07] ways with different uh structures and of course at different times they’re able to
[00:17:11] divide the world in different ways and so we have these very different cultures and we hold the world
[00:17:15] in utterly different ways we see a different culture so as a result of all of those things
[00:17:19] because our perspective is limited by our history by our language by our physiology we are stuck
[00:17:28] in this particular framework and therefore how are we to understand uh whether it is capable of
[00:17:35] describing the world out there and it seems to me we now have to have exactly the reverse of this history of the last 100 years
[00:17:41] 300 years of trying to show how knowledge is possible, we should start from the idea that
[00:17:45] knowledge isn’t possible. That’s what we’ve uncovered from our observations of the world.
[00:17:51] And instead, we’ve got to create an account, a theory, which enables us to explain how it is
[00:17:59] that even though we can’t ever arrive at knowledge, we are nevertheless able to intervene
[00:18:05] with remarkable precision. I mean, maybe not as well as we’d like, but to a remarkable degree,
[00:18:12] we’re able to intervene. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve tried to provide an account
[00:18:18] which explains how it’s possible that even though we can’t describe what’s out there,
[00:18:23] we have a way of making it work. And in an overall, very short summary version, I would say
[00:18:31] my account of that would be that instead of imagining that
[00:18:35] the world out there is differentiated and that what language is doing is it’s just naming the
[00:18:40] parts as if we’re in some giant multiple choice question where there might be a right answer.
[00:18:46] Oh, we just got it right. That that’s a mistake, that the world is not differentiated in that
[00:18:53] sort of way. We should just think it because I don’t think we can say what the world is like.
[00:18:57] I think imagine it as being open, that it’s undifferentiated. And what we do is we close
[00:19:03] that openness of the world.
[00:19:05] We enter things. And that process of closure is the bit that I’m interested in. How has that
[00:19:10] happened? And I think as just an immediate example of that, if you take the neuroscience
[00:19:16] version of neurons in the brain, when a neuron responds to the world, it doesn’t describe the
[00:19:23] world. It just fires or it doesn’t fire. The firing of the neuron or the not firing of the
[00:19:28] neuron is not a description of what’s out there, is it? Of course it isn’t. It’s a way of responding
[00:19:33] to it. And it holds.
[00:19:35] All of the world, all of openness as just the firing of the neuron. And that is an example of
[00:19:42] closure. Closure takes that which is different and it holds it as one and the same. And I think
[00:19:46] layers of our internal processing build on that. And the accounts that we give, the big accounts
[00:19:53] we give in language and in thought are metaphors. They’re metaphors for how we intervene in the
[00:19:59] world. And we can refine those metaphors. We can challenge them in terms of the observations we
[00:20:05] make from within the framework of all of our closures. But we can’t ever escape from those
[00:20:10] perspectives to say how things are ultimately. Okay, fantastic. So we’ve got off to a really
[00:20:16] great start. Thank you all to all our speakers so far. I think we need to take a quick step back
[00:20:22] though. And let’s just retrace our steps a little bit. Let’s go back to this idea. Do our theories
[00:20:27] and beliefs about the world, do they describe reality? I think all of you’ve kind of already
[00:20:31] thrown that into some degree of question. So maybe not necessarily, but maybe you’ve kind of thrown
[00:20:35] that into some degree of question. So maybe not necessarily describe reality, but how do they
[00:20:37] relate to reality? Our theories and beliefs. Abby, could we start with you? So I think what
[00:20:44] renders Soviet economics and neoclassical economics as kind of unique and one the more
[00:20:51] hedonistic twin of the other, is that they both operate with a kind of copy theory of knowledge.
[00:20:56] The idea that given the correct methodology, you can read off society in a way that is sort of
[00:21:04] transcendent.
[00:21:05] That you can read reality like a book of truth and translate that into government policies that
[00:21:11] can only have a very predetermined effect. So what they effectively get into is a world of
[00:21:17] continuous surprise. And a lot of them are very unpleasant. And in the neoliberal era,
[00:21:23] we’re at 45 years of unpleasant surprises, which is why the British economy functions as badly as
[00:21:29] it does. What’s very distinctive about that is these are arguments that are very, very, very
[00:21:35] difficult to understand. They’re arguments from axiomatic assumption, right? They’re arguments
[00:21:37] from utopian assumptions. Whereas the majority of social sciences, like the natural sciences,
[00:21:46] but the social sciences have these additional contingencies because of the imaginative nature
[00:21:51] of the subject, that we have tended to use hypothetical deductions. So we have built theory,
[00:21:59] Keynesianism, for example, as the post-war economics was built on the idea that there
[00:22:03] are historical patterns.
[00:22:04] In booms and busts, we can be quite pragmatic in our theorizing of how those work from observation.
[00:22:12] And then we can build a theory of how the state should manage
[00:22:15] the mediation of these booms and busts and sort of viewing financial markets as operating with a
[00:22:22] kind of observable herd behavior. Not rational actors, but indeed irrational actors, lots of
[00:22:28] group psychology going on. So again, that needs to be regulated and mediated. So I think the
[00:22:34] last 45 years is really unique and sort of extraordinary in the British context, because we
[00:22:39] always think of ourselves complacently and historically as so pragmatic and historicist
[00:22:45] and somehow immune to utopian ideologies. But we’ve been living under a utopian ideology for
[00:22:49] 45 years, and it’s not going well. Actually, Lezhak Kozhakovsky, one of the great moral
[00:22:54] philosophers of the Soviet system, said it’s almost wrong to call it a secular theology,
[00:22:59] because theologies themselves, Christianity doesn’t claim to be able to read the world.
[00:23:04] It says we see through a glass darkly. So it’s extraordinary to have an eschatology that says,
[00:23:09] no, no, no, it’s a science. We can read the world. That’s truly sort of, those are claims of
[00:23:14] godlike knowledge that even religions don’t make. Could I ask, so it seems that what you’re saying
[00:23:19] is we’ve been operating under theories and beliefs. I mean, forgive me if I’m interpreting
[00:23:24] this wrong. You’re saying it’s not really giving us proper readings of how things really are,
[00:23:29] which says to me that you do still feel that there are ways that we could get a clearer
[00:23:34] reading.
[00:23:34] On what’s really happening. Is that fair to say?
[00:23:38] So I guess my understanding would be within the sort of Kantian tradition, within the philosophy
[00:23:42] of science, in which Thomas Kuhn also stands in critical realism in philosophy of science,
[00:23:49] also stands, which is the idea that we can never transcend the history of our own curiosity.
[00:23:56] So we’re always subject to the theories that came before. And we can’t read the future.
[00:24:01] We have ontological indeterminacy, because the world is not a reality.
[00:24:04] Because the world is always becoming something else. So the past is not a statistical shadow of the future.
[00:24:09] But it doesn’t mean we know nothing. Because society is structured. It changes, but it changes in
[00:24:14] structured ways. You know, the nature of poverty historically has very consistent negative
[00:24:20] effects on people’s lives. But the causes of inequality change. But they don’t change randomly.
[00:24:26] We can observe different causes of inequality, and we can use different lenses to get some
[00:24:34] kind of picture. But it’s a fragmented picture. So to get there, we have fragments, but
[00:24:39] the fragments within the Kuhnian idea is that they help us genuinely solve problems.
[00:24:45] Hilary, does this feel like it equates with what you were saying?
[00:24:49] Well, I think your question was the interesting one that you asked, which is, well, doesn’t
[00:24:54] this imply that there is truth after all, that we’ve just got some traditional realist
[00:24:59] frame? It’s just that we’ve got fragments of truth.
[00:25:04] And I think our challenge philosophically is to provide a theory which makes sense of that.
[00:25:12] I don’t think it’s possible to give a philosophical account of how we have truth. I don’t think there
[00:25:16] is a realist story that makes sense. No one’s been it. We’ve been, philosophers have been
[00:25:20] trying to come up with one for the last hundred years. I think it’s a shambles. The American
[00:25:25] philosopher Hilary Putnam in the 90s said the attempt to describe the relationship between
[00:25:31] language and the world based on realism is a shambles.
[00:25:34] It’s a shambles from the outset. And I don’t think that’s an option. So we’ve got to have
[00:25:39] some alternative version of what’s operational. In terms of the economic story, yeah, there’s
[00:25:47] a Soviet economics. There’s a classical liberal economics. There’s probably an indefinite number
[00:25:52] of other possible frames of economics. And I would predict from looking at the way that
[00:25:57] closure operates that you can take any of those different accounts and you can refine them
[00:26:02] and deal with the things that are going on in the world. And I think that’s a great
[00:26:04] idea.
[00:26:05] There are things that happen in the world. If you’re a Marxist, you know, you can always
[00:26:06] come up with an explanation of why this particular thing has happened, why, you know, we haven’t
[00:26:11] arrived at the ideal society or whatever it would be, just as a liberal economist can
[00:26:15] try and account for where they’re up to. And what’s going on there is they are metaphors
[00:26:20] for how you might hold the world. And we endlessly refine them. And crucially, we make judgments
[00:26:27] about which overall metaphor we want to run with, whether we think the way that breaks
[00:26:32] things up is one which is.
[00:26:34] Is really powerful and effective or whether we think that it’s not powerful and effective.
[00:26:39] But I do think we have to give up the idea that we or anyone else is going to come up
[00:26:44] with an answer, because I don’t think that’s our relationship with the stuff out there.
[00:26:48] Yeah, I would agree with that.
[00:26:50] No, I agree. But you must also always historicize the fact that we are answering, trying to
[00:27:00] answer or discussing this question.
[00:27:04] It’s relevant because we are discussing it now. So, yeah, there are various types of
[00:27:11] closures. I just use your lexicon, very types of closures. You could call them epistemological
[00:27:18] islands, if you will. But these epistemological islands felt quite comfortable under certain
[00:27:27] conditions, and that is namely in the comfort zone at the end of history that was dominated
[00:27:32] by one overarching metaphor.
[00:27:34] Again, in your language, that was neoliberalism. And the reason why we’re asking these questions
[00:27:41] now and are looking for perhaps other epistemological certainties called the truth claims, whatever,
[00:27:49] is precisely because that utopian form of running societies has completely derailed
[00:27:58] and our islands do not feel so comfortable anymore. We have not been able to simply
[00:28:03] navigate from island to island and happily and merrily any longer. The little boats
[00:28:09] that we are on is sinking. And we have to find islands that give us some epistemological
[00:28:17] footing, as it were, because we are facing a clusterfuck of world historical proportions.
[00:28:27] Technical term.
[00:28:28] And I mean it in a politicizing way. It’s not just the word that I use. And the cluster
[00:28:33] is the result of neoliberal policies and the framework. It’s inequality. It’s precarity.
[00:28:39] It’s climate destruction. And we need to somehow grapple with that. And that’s why we’re raising
[00:28:47] the question again. Why do we feel we have to move beyond that postmodern moment or that
[00:28:52] postmodern philosophy? Because it is no longer working. We need to move on.
[00:28:58] But just to be provocative, and if I’m correct in in in shooting what Hillary is saying,
[00:29:03] is there a danger that we’re trying to use history as the ground above the metaphors,
[00:29:08] like something that we can justify our particular choice of favorite metaphor because we’re
[00:29:13] saying, oh, but it’s the historical moment? Abbie, do you think that that is anything
[00:29:17] to that? Are you are you hoping history will give you an answer?
[00:29:22] I’m hoping observable reality will give us answers. And over time, that becomes history.
[00:29:26] And so to take to take up Hillary’s point about metaphors, one of the things that’s
[00:29:31] so fundamentally problematic about neoclassical architecture is the fact that there are so
[00:29:33] many metaphors. And one of the things that’s so fundamentally problematic about neoclassical
[00:29:34] economics is it’s built entirely from metaphor and metaphors that prove impossible to reattach
[00:29:39] to reality. The Nobel Prize winning economist Romer talks about the mathiness of economics
[00:29:45] and the problem that these metaphors, you know, that you end up with these terrible
[00:29:49] narrative oscillations where you might be able to pin one bit of the model down to a
[00:29:52] bit of observable reality, but you’ll never be able to pin the whole thing down because
[00:29:56] it’s built on pure metaphor. And in philosophy of science terms, that’s not abstraction.
[00:30:02] It’s fictionalization. Yes. You know, it’s a fundamental difference. And where we
[00:30:07] necessarily work in abstractions if we’re trying to build theories in social science
[00:30:12] that is hypothetical deductive, that’s empiricist, that is historical, that takes the social
[00:30:18] context seriously. We’re in a world of theorizing that is very easy to reattach to society and
[00:30:25] is not entirely metaphorical. If if I have a policy that leads to four million children,
[00:30:32] being destitute, as we have in the current British system, I would say that this is
[00:30:36] not socially optimal, but it’s supposedly built on a universal theory. If I look carefully
[00:30:43] at the causes of poverty in childhood in the UK, I think I have a really good chance
[00:30:50] of solving it. So the reason I think that we’re not in such a diffuse sort of ungraspable
[00:30:59] world is.
[00:31:02] Science and morally driven politics can work and work in any meaningful sense in the sense
[00:31:08] that we could solve the climate crisis if we chose to. We could feed children if we
[00:31:13] chose to. We know how to do it. So we should do it.
[00:31:17] So let’s let’s pick up a couple of those points, Hilary. So so Abi and Robin are talking
[00:31:22] about tangible situations happening right now. Inequality, poverty, the climate crisis.
[00:31:28] One of the criticisms often levelled at postmodernism was it was a bit socially irrelevant. It was
[00:31:31] a bit socially irrelevant. It was a bit socially irrelevant. It was a bit socially irrelevant.
[00:31:32] It was a bit socially irrelevant. It was a bit socially irrelevant. It was a bit socially
[00:31:32] irresponsible like this, because if anything, anything went, anything could go. Any sort
[00:31:36] of metaphor, whichever you like, doesn’t matter, doesn’t get us any closer to solving
[00:31:41] these sorts of problems. So how does your sort of I am how does your kind of approach
[00:31:45] your your idea of closure? How does that kind of reconcile the freedom of postmodernism
[00:31:50] with the very serious real problems that we’re sort of facing today?
[00:31:54] Well, as I began when I started here, I think the postmodernism, if it’s understood as
[00:32:02] why it generates just a whole range of alternative frameworks and we’ve got no way of choosing
[00:32:08] between them, then that is not a viable way of operating. We have to have a way of moving
[00:32:14] forward. The framework that I have outlined with closure is precisely an attempt to try
[00:32:20] and show how we are able to modify our accounts of the world in the light of what we observe
[00:32:28] and how it combines with our other frameworks.
[00:32:29] How do we change the world? Can we modify our way of world that we see? As a result of
[00:32:30] the fact that we’re in a time when we’re in an era of social distancing where there’s an
[00:32:31] slammed up policy and social distancing just going on and we’re not able to push the table,
[00:32:32] works in what would traditionally be thought of as rationality, how we use that in order to
[00:32:39] improve our model. And I would argue that in the context closure, there are sort of key
[00:32:46] characteristics of the way that all closures work. So I would agree with the others on the panel
[00:32:53] that, of course, there are a whole load of things wrong with the way that we understand that, well,
[00:32:57] the moment is not functioning in the way that we would ideally like. But let’s not imagine that
[00:33:03] there’s a correct answer just around the corner that, you know, what we really need is a theory
[00:33:09] which is going to solve all of those things. We need a better account and we need to refine
[00:33:15] our metaphors and our models of the world. And we can do that at the same time as giving up the idea
[00:33:23] that the world is knowable and there is a correct answer,
[00:33:27] which seems to be the case.
[00:33:27] It seems to me profoundly dangerous.
[00:33:30] No, I agree with that.
[00:33:31] And it’s why, you know, we lurch from one problematic account of the world to another
[00:33:36] problematic account. So, yes, we intervene to address the problems that we have, of which
[00:33:42] there are many. And indeed, there is always new radical alternative ways of holding the world
[00:33:49] because they’re not fixed in any sense. There’s always a new framework that everything is about.
[00:33:53] Well, what is that new framework? What are the consequences of it?
[00:33:57] How is it going to work? How does it overcome the issues? And then we can make a judgment.
[00:34:02] Well, is that going to work better than the one that we’ve got at the moment?
[00:34:06] Yeah, I also have the feeling that our analyses are on a different sort of level of abstraction
[00:34:14] in philosophy. But I’m constantly trying to use your concepts to draw it into the question that
[00:34:23] we’re also addressing about after postmodernism.
[00:34:27] We are now in a social situation in which the dominant metaphors in which we held the world,
[00:34:35] the neoliberal frameworks, have just been proven to be untenable. And we are now questioning
[00:34:43] again ourselves what kind of new enclosures or closures we should mobilize in order to face
[00:34:52] the problems that we are dealing with.
[00:34:55] I think that is the historically new…
[00:34:57] aspect of our current times. And our main big problematic, as it were, is that we have not
[00:35:09] settled yet on a set of frameworks, on a set of metaphors, on a way of holding the world in a
[00:35:17] closure now. And that the previous model is completely in flux and we’re in a moment of
[00:35:23] transition. And that is, I think, what is at stake.
[00:35:27] And that is why we are having these kind of questions. We all feel that there is something
[00:35:31] at stake, but we have not agreed upon how to deal with those stakes. And that is the key question.
[00:35:40] There’s also a question of how, of style, I would say, the style of the closure that we’re choosing,
[00:35:47] the style in which we close and hold the world. And at the moment, we can see sort of an aesthetic
[00:35:53] mode in which we enclose the world and in which we build our moment. And that is the key question.
[00:35:55] and in which we build our metaphors.
[00:35:58] And it’s aesthetic because it uses the as-if logic.
[00:36:03] We pretend as if we have some kind of truth claim.
[00:36:08] We know that it’s not the truth,
[00:36:10] but because it has a function for me,
[00:36:13] I mobilize it anyway as a way to engage with the world
[00:36:16] and hold it in your terms.
[00:36:21] That’s from Kant.
[00:36:23] It’s Kantian logic, as-if logic.
[00:36:25] It’s also used by Wenger, Eva Scheper,
[00:36:29] and most recently by Kwame Appiah.
[00:36:33] And I think that is what we’re seeing.
[00:36:34] And that is also, for instance, in the post-truth debate.
[00:36:38] That is also in the mingling of fact and fiction
[00:36:40] that we constantly see.
[00:36:42] I think that is a different style of holding the world,
[00:36:45] in your terms, than the utopian way
[00:36:49] that was based on the homo economicus and its rationalism.
[00:36:54] That was a different way of holding the world
[00:36:57] than we are currently seeing,
[00:36:58] which is much more aesthetic, I would say,
[00:37:00] rather than rational.
[00:37:03] And I think that is the debate we’re having.
[00:37:06] But just to be provocative, Naby,
[00:37:07] I’m gonna sort of turn to you on this.
[00:37:09] So obviously I’m sat with two philosophers
[00:37:12] and a political economist,
[00:37:13] and you all seem quite comfortable with the idea
[00:37:15] that it’s an intellectually responsible project
[00:37:17] to accept uncertainty, provisionality,
[00:37:20] to search for a range of different metaphors.
[00:37:24] Actually, right now at this moment in the world,
[00:37:26] and for the majority of people who perhaps aren’t,
[00:37:29] you know, aren’t practicing philosophers or what have you,
[00:37:32] is that not slightly a dangerous strategy?
[00:37:35] I mean, if people don’t feel that something’s the truth,
[00:37:38] is there not something pragmatic
[00:37:40] to be able to say to people,
[00:37:41] look, this is true, you should do this because dot, dot, dot.
[00:37:46] Do we take a risk if we just concentrate all our efforts
[00:37:52] on becoming comfortable with uncertainty?
[00:37:54] I think it’s a great question
[00:37:55] because I think part of the nature of the crisis
[00:37:57] is we’ve got used to a language, a political narrative
[00:38:02] that deals in false necessities and unsafe certainties,
[00:38:06] right?
[00:38:06] We live in a world in which we think there is a truth,
[00:38:08] and if you go against it,
[00:38:10] you break some predetermined economic law,
[00:38:12] even though those don’t exist.
[00:38:15] What holds us apart from the post-war era,
[00:38:18] and I think the 30s and the war,
[00:38:20] taught people of left and right
[00:38:22] that we live in an imperfect
[00:38:23] and an imperfectible world and a world of uncertainty.
[00:38:26] And so there was a kind of intellectual humility
[00:38:30] on the left and the right
[00:38:31] about the fact that we’re trying to make ourselves
[00:38:35] more resilient in an uncertain world
[00:38:37] rather than trying to build a whole utopia.
[00:38:40] So what strikes me as realist about democracy,
[00:38:45] about liberal democracy,
[00:38:47] is that it’s very consistent with a philosophy of science
[00:38:50] that says, particularly in the social world,
[00:38:52] there is, there’s no single narrative.
[00:38:53] Right?
[00:38:54] There is no governing science.
[00:38:57] And so it’s very consistent and in principle brilliant
[00:39:01] in terms of its protections for individual freedom
[00:39:04] to have a system of representation
[00:39:08] that is then mediated through parties
[00:39:10] that ideally would understand themselves
[00:39:12] in non-utopian ways,
[00:39:14] that they don’t have final answers,
[00:39:16] in order to mediate the changing world
[00:39:19] that they’re trying to deal with.
[00:39:21] And I think one of the problems is, so, that’s, you know,
[00:39:22] that’s the problem.
[00:39:22] That’s the problem.
[00:39:23] That’s what I think philosophically, politically,
[00:39:25] and this is picking up on a preoccupation of Robin’s,
[00:39:28] which I think is a really important one,
[00:39:30] which is that in a realistic sense,
[00:39:32] we have dying neoliberal utopian parties
[00:39:36] that are functionally extinct
[00:39:38] in terms of having any answers,
[00:39:40] but they’re at the height of their structural power.
[00:39:43] And so as Richard Lowenthal wrote about the Soviets
[00:39:47] in the 1960s,
[00:39:48] they are hunting around for alternative narratives
[00:39:50] that continue to justify their power and new combat tasks.
[00:39:53] So, yeah, how can we remobilize our support?
[00:39:57] We can’t go to economic mobilization anymore
[00:39:59] because it lacks all credibility.
[00:40:01] But nationalist and racist mobilizations
[00:40:03] are a way of sustaining those interests,
[00:40:07] but now under kind of different narrative forms.
[00:40:09] So it is incredibly incumbent on opponents of those parties
[00:40:14] to be able to narrate that process
[00:40:17] and sort of articulate that dynamic,
[00:40:20] but also to have alternatives
[00:40:22] and to raise a provocative final thought
[00:40:23] that is not necessarily a fundamental truth.
[00:40:26] And that’s what I’ve thought.
[00:40:27] Maybe there is a fundamental truth, actually.
[00:40:30] Maybe I’ll lay claim to a fundamental truth,
[00:40:32] which is Herman Daly’s fundamental truth,
[00:40:35] which is that the economy
[00:40:36] is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature.
[00:40:40] And that is the closure of all closures, potentially,
[00:40:43] in the sense that in order to stay in the game,
[00:40:47] we need a form of political economic debate
[00:40:50] that takes that fundamental truth immensely seriously,
[00:40:53] and economic and social narratives
[00:40:55] based on the idea that we need to regenerate nature
[00:40:58] in order to have any kind of debate at all.
[00:41:00] Yeah, agreed.
[00:41:01] So, Hilario.
[00:41:08] I think you ought to say something back to that,
[00:41:10] because we seem to have snuck
[00:41:11] a fundamental objective truth back in right at the end.
[00:41:15] Have you any reply to that?
[00:41:17] Yeah, it’s very sneaky to do it sort of way.
[00:41:20] Well, I think that
[00:41:23] all people who have strong political views
[00:41:26] from whichever direction you might hold them
[00:41:29] are tempted by the idea of claiming
[00:41:31] that their account is true.
[00:41:34] Every tyrant has believed that their version is true.
[00:41:39] One of the strangenesses is that there are many people
[00:41:44] who want to argue in favor of objective truth,
[00:41:48] but they don’t seem to have much agreement between them
[00:41:50] of what they think that objective truth is.
[00:41:52] The Pope,
[00:41:53] the one that resigned,
[00:41:56] said that the attack on objective truth
[00:41:58] was absolutely fundamentally problematic
[00:42:02] because it undermined all belief.
[00:42:04] Scientists or philosophers sometimes want to say,
[00:42:09] no, no, no, no,
[00:42:09] this is the scientific account of the world,
[00:42:12] which is the root to the truth.
[00:42:14] Politically, you have Liz Truss
[00:42:16] was a great defender of objective truth.
[00:42:19] She was deeply critical of the way that postmodernism was
[00:42:23] undermining beliefs that people had.
[00:42:27] But then on the other side,
[00:42:28] you have Marxists who see this as being objective truth,
[00:42:33] as being a fundamental problem for their outlook.
[00:42:37] Well, surely we just take the consequence
[00:42:40] of that realizing everyone who’s got a view
[00:42:43] about what they want to, how to change the world,
[00:42:46] will tell you that they’ve worked out the truth
[00:42:50] and be very careful of every one of them.
[00:42:53] Be very careful of every one of them.
[00:42:55] And we need to constantly remember that at the same time
[00:42:58] as seeking to improve our accounts of the world,
[00:43:01] observing the ways that they don’t work,
[00:43:04] observing how we might change them.
[00:43:07] Let me take your way of within classical economics.
[00:43:10] It doesn’t work in this way.
[00:43:11] What can we do about it?
[00:43:12] Is there anything we can do about it?
[00:43:13] Maybe we can’t.
[00:43:14] Maybe you think, actually, this just doesn’t work,
[00:43:16] this overall framework.
[00:43:17] We need another way.
[00:43:18] We need to change it.
[00:43:19] We need to change it.
[00:43:20] We need to change it.
[00:43:21] We need to change it.
[00:43:22] We need to change it.
[00:43:23] And if there’s another one, let’s examine that.
[00:43:25] Let’s use our empiricism and rationality
[00:43:29] to examine our models.
[00:43:31] I think one of the fundamental problems of the current time
[00:43:35] is that because of this awareness of perspective,
[00:43:38] there’s increasing questioning of empiricism and rationality,
[00:43:42] as if these techniques of the Enlightenment
[00:43:47] were supporters of prejudice and hierarchy and authority,
[00:43:52] which, of course,
[00:43:53] they have been.
[00:43:54] But the solution is not to give up the strategies of empiricism and rationalism.
[00:44:01] It’s to give up the idea that they bring you to truth.
[00:44:05] Empiricism and rationalism is how we improve our models,
[00:44:09] how we improve our closures.
[00:44:11] And far from giving up on those,
[00:44:13] we need to double down on those.
[00:44:15] And if someone’s got to say, look at it like this,
[00:44:18] well, let’s challenge what we’d say.
[00:44:20] Let’s say, how does it fit with this?
[00:44:22] How does it tie in with that other view of you?
[00:44:25] We apply that, but we give up the idea that we might arrive…
[00:44:29] Every model that we have in the world is going to fail.
[00:44:33] And it’s going to fail because it’s not the same thing
[00:44:36] as the stuff out there.
[00:44:37] It’s a way of holding it.
[00:44:39] I still feel that this is quite…
[00:44:41] There is quite a clear distinction being made here,
[00:44:45] because I just think that what Hilary’s saying
[00:44:49] is that we’ve got to somehow become quite clear
[00:44:51] and become quite comfortable with giving up
[00:44:54] some of our own authority as intellectuals,
[00:44:57] in order to really come to terms with plurality.
[00:45:00] Robin, how do you feel about that?
[00:45:02] Well, Hilary is sketching a theory of knowledge,
[00:45:05] which I completely agree on as an abstract model,
[00:45:09] the way that you described it.
[00:45:11] That’s fine.
[00:45:13] How I’m presenting this, what comes after postmodernism,
[00:45:17] is as a philosopher of culture and a cultural analysis.
[00:45:20] And for me, it is precisely that this position in debate
[00:45:24] can now be made by you,
[00:45:26] is a symptom of a very broad discussion that is going on
[00:45:31] in philosophy, but also in political theory,
[00:45:34] and is also mirroring all kinds of debates and discussion
[00:45:38] that are questioning our dominant ways of thinking about the world,
[00:45:42] as we have done for, let’s say, the 45 years that you are describing.
[00:45:47] So as a theory of knowledge, I completely agree.
[00:45:49] As a…
[00:45:50] As a cultural philosopher, I see this as a symptom
[00:45:53] of this shift from postmodern theory of knowledge
[00:45:58] and postmodernism to a metamodern theory of knowledge,
[00:46:01] I think yours sounds very convincing,
[00:46:04] and metamodernism in culture.
[00:46:06] And I think they’re all related.
[00:46:08] They…
[00:46:09] We as philosophers, we’re not thinking in a vacuum.
[00:46:12] We read the newspaper, we talk to each other, we have debates,
[00:46:16] we have to raise our kids, we notice that life
[00:46:19] is incredibly expensive with young kids in the global north at the moment.
[00:46:24] So we live it.
[00:46:26] So I think that is the difference in the register in which we operate,
[00:46:32] but I completely agree with you,
[00:46:33] and I can place it within wider debates that we’re currently having
[00:46:36] that cannot any longer be defined as a postmodern theory of knowledge,
[00:46:40] for instance.
[00:46:41] I’m dangerously in agreement with you as well.
[00:46:44] Shall we end on that note of agreement?
[00:46:46] Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking
[00:46:48] our fantastic panellists for a brilliant event.
[00:46:54] Thank you for listening to Philosophy For Our Times.
[00:46:57] If you enjoyed the episode, please like, subscribe,
[00:47:01] and don’t hesitate to get in touch via the email in the show notes.
[00:47:05] And until next time, stay safe and have a good one.
[00:47:08] Bye, guys.