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The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that automatically produces "close imitations" of postmodernist writing. It was written in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars.^[1] A free version is also hosted online. The essays are produced from a formal grammar defined by a recursive transition network.^[2]

Key Information

An example of a randomly generated title.
Type of site	Parody generator
Available in	English
Owner	Andrew C. Bulhak
Created by	Andrew C. Bulhak
URL	Postmodernism Generator
Commercial	No
Launched	1996
Current status	Active

Responses

[edit]

The Postmodernism Generator was mentioned by biologist Richard Dawkins in the conclusion to his article "Postmodernism Disrobed"^[3] (1998) for the scientific journal Nature, reprinted in his book A Devil's Chaplain (2004).^[4]

After he "produced the first two [lines] using a 'Postmodernism Generator,' and the second two using an 'Analytic Philosophy Generator'", philosophy of information and information ethics researcher Luciano Floridi stated, that

"So many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops working. The world may be undergoing a revolution, Rome may be burning, but the philosophical discourse remains detached, meaningless, and utterly oblivious. Time for an upgrade."^[5]

References

[edit]

^ Bulhak, Andrew C. (April 1, 1996). "On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility using Recursive Transition Networks" (PDF). Department of Computer Science Technical Report 96/264. Monash University.
^ Russell, Jesse; Cohn, Ronald (2013-01-21). Postmodernism Generator, by Jesse Russell. Book on Demand. ISBN 978-5-511-42969-4.
^ Dawkins, Richard (July 9, 1998). "Postmodernism Disrobed" (PDF). Nature. 394 (6689): 141–143. Bibcode:1998Natur.394..141D. doi:10.1038/28089.
^ Richard Dawkins (2004). A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. pp. 47–53, citation p. 53. ISBN 978-0-618-48539-0.
^ Luciano Floridi (Winter 2017). "Why Information Matters". The New Atlantis. Retrieved 1 January 2023.

External links

[edit]

Official website (generates a random article each time loaded)

v t e Criticism of postmodernism
Concepts	Altermodern Anti-anti-art Hypermodernity Metamodernism Neomodern Neomodernism New sincerity Post-irony Post-postmodernism Remodernism Remodernist film Stuckism International Transmodernism
Critics	Anderson Benson Berman Bricmont Bunge Chomsky Crews Dawkins Dennett Dussel Eagleton Fukuyama Hicks Jameson Kramer Lindsay Paglia Peterson Pluckrose Scruton Sokal Windschuttle
Works	Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) Higher Superstition (1994) Dead White Males (1995) Fashionable Nonsense (1997) Explaining Postmodernism (2004) The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense (2006) Cynical Theories (2020)
Related	Grievance studies affair Postmodernism Generator Science wars Sokal affair

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Postmodernism Generator

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The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program designed to automatically produce text mimicking the style of postmodernist academic essays, combining recursive grammatical structures with an assortment of philosophical buzzwords and concepts to yield output that appears erudite yet lacks coherent meaning.^[1]^[2] Created in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak at Monash University, it utilizes the Dada Engine, a software system for generating random prose from predefined grammars that emulate the convoluted syntax and thematic tropes common in postmodern theory.^[3]^[4] The tool's explicit disclaimer—that each generated essay is "completely meaningless"—underscores its satirical purpose: to illustrate how formulaic application of jargon can simulate intellectual depth without substantive argumentation, thereby critiquing perceived excesses in postmodern discourse.^[2]^[1] Hosted persistently at elsewhere.org since its inception, the generator has influenced online skepticism toward opaque academic writing styles and been referenced in broader debates on the empirical validity of certain philosophical methodologies.^[2]

Origins and Development

Creation and Creator

The Postmodernism Generator was developed by Andrew C. Bulhak, a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.^[5] Bulhak's work focused on computational methods for text generation, including the use of recursive transition networks to model linguistic structures.^[5] Bulhak created the generator in April 1996 as a demonstration of how algorithmic rules could replicate the convoluted syntax, jargon-heavy lexicon, and recursive argumentation typical of certain postmodernist academic texts.^[6] His approach stemmed from analyzing these texts' formulaic patterns, which he argued could be simulated to produce output that appeared scholarly yet lacked substantive meaning—a critique echoed in his accompanying paper, "On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility Using Recursive Transition Networks."^[5] The tool's launch aligned temporally with heightened debates over academic integrity in the humanities, including physicist Alan Sokal's submission of a deliberately nonsensical hoax article to the journal Social Text in May 1996, which was accepted and published without peer review, thereby exposing vulnerabilities in postmodern-influenced editorial practices. While Bulhak's project predated Sokal's hoax by weeks, both underscored the potential for parody to reveal reliance on stylistic imitation over empirical or logical substance in some scholarly discourse.^[6]

Technical Foundation: The Dada Engine

The Dada Engine is a text generation system created by Andrew C. Bulhak in 1996 at Monash University's Department of Computer Science, designed for nondeterministic production of ASCII text via recursive transition networks (RTNs).^[5] It operates by parsing grammar specifications in the "pb" language—a declarative format for defining rules in a file, where each rule assigns a symbol (e.g., <sentence>) to one or more alternatives separated by vertical bars (|), incorporating literal strings enclosed in double quotes and recursive references to other symbols.^[7] This setup forms a recursive grammar akin to context-free productions, but with inherent randomness: during evaluation, the engine selects alternatives probabilistically (uniformly by default) rather than deterministically, enabling variable outputs from the same ruleset.^[7] Evaluation begins with a designated start symbol, expanding recursively through rule substitutions while buffering generated text until completion, after which it emits the result. Recursion allows for nested structures, such as adjectives modifying themselves (e.g., <adjective>: "very" <adjective> | "red";), preventing infinite loops via probabilistic termination on base cases. In the context of the Postmodernism Generator, the pb script defines nonterminals for syntactic elements like phrases and clauses, populating terminals with a curated lexicon of postmodernist jargon—terms such as "hegemonic discourse," "subaltern," and "problematize"—to constrain randomness within domain-specific vocabulary.^[5] This integration ensures outputs adhere to grammatical hierarchies (e.g., noun phrases embedding modifiers), yielding syntactically coherent sequences without enforcing semantic linkages between expansions. The engine's architecture demonstrates that grammatical plausibility emerges from rule-based recursion and stochastic selection, independent of referential or causal constraints. Outputs maintain structural integrity—proper nesting, agreement in form, and discourse-like progression—solely because alternatives are pre-vetted for syntactic fit, not meaning; random branching thus replicates surface complexity while exposing the absence of integrated semantics, as no mechanism propagates context across derivations beyond positional rules. This reveals how target discourses may prioritize syntactic elaboration over substantive depth, with empirical text plausibility deriving from pattern-matching to observed linguistic norms rather than truth-bearing content.^[7]^[5]

Mechanism and Output

Text Generation Process

The Postmodernism Generator operates through the Dada Engine, a software system that interprets a custom grammar specification in PB format to produce text via recursive expansion of production rules. This process starts with a root non-terminal symbol denoting an entire essay, which the engine expands stochastically by substituting non-terminals with sequences of terminals—such as specific nouns, verbs, adjectives, and phrases—and further non-terminals, following predefined syntactic templates that replicate academic prose structures.^[3]^[1] Selections within expansions draw from curated lexicons of jargon-heavy terms (e.g., "hegemonic discourse," "subtextual paradigm") and weighted probabilities assigned to rules, enabling variability in phrasing while preserving grammatical correctness and thematic semblance to postmodernist scholarship; for instance, rules may prioritize certain verb-noun pairings to mimic convoluted argumentation. The engine incorporates modules for generating pseudo-citations, randomly assembling references to philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Lacan alongside invented titles and publication details, which are interwoven into the text and compiled into a faux bibliography at the conclusion.^[1]^[3] User interaction triggers regeneration via a web interface button, prompting the server to re-execute the full expansion from the root symbol, yielding a distinct output each time without altering the underlying grammar; this ensures reproducibility for critique, as the fixed rules allow inspection of the PB script for biases in lexical choices or structural emphases. Resulting essays form coherent paragraphs grouped under fabricated headings (e.g., addressing "neocultural constructions"), typically spanning multiple sections to simulate a complete scholarly piece.^[1]

Characteristics of Generated Essays

The essays produced by the Postmodernism Generator exhibit a stylistic mimicry of postmodern academic writing through dense, jargon-heavy prose that prioritizes abstract conceptual layering over concrete assertions.^[8]^[1] Typical outputs begin with titles framing dialectical tensions, such as "The Circular Key: Socialism, realism and subtextual Marxism," followed by paragraphs invoking neologisms like "pretextual narrativity," "semantic desublimation," and "Batailleist `powerful communication'."^[9]^[8] This lexicon draws from recurrent postmodern motifs, including references to theorists such as Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, and Derrida, often integrated via fabricated scholarly citations (e.g., 1, 2).^[9]^[8] Structurally, the texts adopt the form of humanities essays, with an attributed fictional author from an academic institution (e.g., "Catherine Finnis, Department of Deconstruction, University of California, Berkeley") and segmented discussions that shift abruptly between interconnected yet undefined ideas, such as the "defining characteristic of culture" or "textual society."^[9]^[8] Sentence construction favors complexity through subordinate clauses and qualifiers, yielding opaque syntax that sustains superficial readability without linear progression or empirical referents.^[10] For instance, openings frequently declare predominant concepts in an author's works, as in "In the works of Eco, a predominant concept is the concept of pretextual narrativity," before circling tautological claims like "Sexual identity is part of the defining characteristic of culture."^[8] The resulting outputs maintain an illusion of depth via repetitive invocation of binaries (e.g., destruction vs. creation, realism vs. deconstructivism) and self-referential dialectics, but empirical scrutiny reveals an absence of verifiable propositions or causal mechanisms.^[8]^[11] Analyses of sample generations confirm high jargon density—often exceeding 20% of vocabulary comprising specialized terms—and fragmented coherence, where thematic exploration substitutes for argumentative resolution.^[8]^[10] This configuration, derived from recursive grammars in the underlying Dada Engine, ensures variability across runs while consistently producing text that parallels the syntactic elaboration and conceptual evasion observed in select postmodernist corpora.^[11]^[1]

Intent and Parodic Critique

Purpose as Satire

The Postmodernism Generator was developed by Andrew C. Bulhak in 1996 specifically to produce "artificial travesties" of postmodernist academic writing, drawing inspiration from Douglas Hofstadter's explorations of algorithmic mimicry in dense, jargon-heavy prose.^[12] Bulhak selected postmodernism, literary criticism, and cultural theory as target genres because their subjective, unfalsifiable nature made it feasible to algorithmically generate text that appeared convincingly scholarly while remaining entirely meaningless.^[12] This approach underscored the genre's heavy dependence on rhetorical form—such as recursive phrases, buzzword clusters, and abstract qualifiers—over verifiable content or causal mechanisms. The satirical mechanism employed randomness through the Dada Engine's recursive grammars to assemble "plausible nonsense," empirically illustrating how postmodernist discourse often prioritizes stylistic opacity to evade substantive scrutiny.^[12] By outputting essays that mimicked the structure and lexicon of real publications yet lacked any coherent argument or empirical anchor, the tool parodied the tolerance for such output in humanities circles, where pattern-matching of ideological tropes could substitute for rigorous analysis.^[12] Bulhak noted that the results often impressed or amused observers precisely because they revealed the genre's vulnerability to mechanical replication without intellectual depth.^[12] This parody directly challenged the normalization of obscurantism in academic writing, favoring clarity and simplicity as hallmarks of truth-seeking over elaborate verbiage that obscures absence of falsifiable claims.^[12] The generator's outputs, explicitly labeled as randomly produced and devoid of meaning on its interface, served as a causal probe into trends where form supplanted function, prompting reflection on why such text might pass peer review or citation thresholds in subjective fields.^[2]

Relation to Broader Critiques of Postmodernism

The Postmodernism Generator's emergence in April 1996 coincided with physicist Alan Sokal's hoax submission of a fabricated article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to the postmodern-leaning journal Social Text. The paper, replete with nonsensical assertions blending quantum physics with social theory, was accepted and published in the journal's Spring/Summer 1996 issue, only for Sokal to reveal the deception in May 1996, exposing peer-review processes susceptible to jargon-heavy, unsubstantiated claims in fields influenced by postmodern relativism.^[13]^[6] This temporal alignment underscores the generator's role in empirically highlighting postmodernism's epistemological vulnerabilities, where grammatical conformity to stylistic tropes suffices for apparent profundity absent rigorous causal or evidential grounding. Such demonstrations resonate with longstanding critiques decrying postmodernism's relativism as disconnected from evidence-based reasoning. Noam Chomsky has dismissed much postmodern discourse as pretentious gibberish, arguing it prioritizes rhetorical opacity over clarity and substantive engagement with reality, rendering it politically impotent and intellectually barren.^[14] Similarly, Steven Pinker has assailed postmodernism's dogmatic relativism and obscurantism as antithetical to rational inquiry, contending that its rejection of objective standards stifles progress by elevating subjective interpretation over empirical verification.^[15] The generator's algorithmic production of "publishable" essays parallels these attacks by mechanizing the very formulaic emptiness they identify, wherein deconstructive skepticism evades falsifiability. Later hoaxes extend this empirical critique, affirming systemic issues in postmodern-derived scholarship. In the 2017–2018 Grievance Studies affair, scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian submitted 20 fabricated papers to journals in fields like gender and critical race studies—domains rooted in postmodern applications to identity and power dynamics—with seven accepted or published, including rewritings of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf framed through feminist lenses and claims of canine sexual consent.^[16] These successes illustrate how relativist premises prioritize narrative alignment over empirical rigor, mirroring the generator's output in perpetuating echo chambers of interpretive license detached from causal realism. From conservative perspectives, this erosion of objective truth enables cultural fragmentation, as relativism supplants shared evidentiary norms with competing subjective constructs, fostering institutional insularity over verifiable discourse.^[17]

Reception and Cultural Impact

Initial and Academic Responses

The Postmodernism Generator was launched in 1996 on the website elsewhere.org by Andrew C. Bulhak, where it rapidly circulated among early internet users via philosophy mailing lists, Usenet groups, and nascent web forums focused on computing and cultural critique.^[2]^[4] Its debut coincided with heightened scrutiny of postmodern academic writing, exemplified by the Sokal affair earlier that year, fostering initial interest as a programmatic parody of opaque prose in fields like literary theory and cultural studies.^[13] Academic responses from the late 1990s and early 2000s were polarized, with critics of postmodernism viewing the tool as a stark illustration of how recursive grammars could mimic—and thus expose—the perceived emptiness of jargon-laden scholarship. Physicist Alan Sokal, whose 1996 hoax paper had already targeted similar excesses, linked to the generator on his personal site, implicitly endorsing its utility in demonstrating syntactically coherent but semantically vacant text.^[13] In contrast, some scholars argued it constituted a reductive caricature, failing to grapple with intentional philosophical maneuvers in postmodern works; for instance, archaeologist and philosopher Alun Salt critiqued it in 2008 for producing rule-bound gibberish akin to placeholder text, rather than engaging the deliberate ambiguities of actual postmodern arguments.^[18] Visibility surged in 2015 when evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted a direct endorsement: "Visit the Postmodernism Generator," linking to the site and prompting renewed shares across social media and skeptic communities.^[19] This amplification spurred contemporaneous online discussions, including Hacker News threads in 2016 garnering over 90 upvotes and Reddit philosophy subreddit posts from as early as 2008 critiquing jargon-heavy disciplines through the generator's outputs.^[20]^[21] Such engagements highlighted its role in lay and academic skepticism toward postmodernism's linguistic conventions, though formal peer-reviewed rebuttals remained sparse in the initial period.

Influence on Anti-Postmodern Discourse

The Postmodernism Generator has bolstered anti-postmodern discourse by providing an empirical demonstration that much postmodernist prose relies on stylistic imitation rather than substantive content, enabling skeptics to generate and dissect ostensibly scholarly text lacking empirical grounding or logical coherence.^[13] Created in 1996, the tool's outputs—randomly assembled from recursive grammars mimicking jargon-heavy academic writing—have been invoked to argue that postmodernism's appeal often stems from obfuscation rather than causal explanatory power, as evidenced by its indistinguishability from some published works in the eyes of critics.^[1] This has fostered a broader cultural skepticism toward relativist frameworks that prioritize narrative over verifiable mechanisms, highlighting "emperor-has-no-clothes" dynamics where authority substitutes for rigor.^[22] Its influence extended to high-profile exposures of academic vulnerabilities, paralleling the 2017-2018 Grievance Studies affair, where hoax papers by James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose drew on the generator's model to fabricate absurd yet accepted submissions in fields influenced by postmodern thought.^[23] For instance, their "conceptual penis" hoax explicitly referenced the generator's technique of producing plausible nonsense, underscoring parallels to how unfalsifiable theories evade scrutiny in grievance-oriented disciplines.^[24] Alan Sokal, whose 1996 hoax initiated similar critiques, endorsed the generator's independent development as contemporaneous evidence of postmodernism's stylistic excesses, amplifying its role in validating hoax-based methodologies for testing peer review's resistance to pseudoscholarship.^[24] These efforts collectively popularized the view that systemic biases in academia—toward ideologically aligned but empirically weak claims—can be probed through parody, contributing to a resurgence of demands for falsifiability in social theory.^[8] Public intellectuals have cited the generator in works debunking normalized relativism, with figures like Sokal integrating it into broader indictments of intellectual imposture, as seen in his ongoing advocacy linking it to defenses of scientific realism against deconstructive skepticism.^[13] References appear in podcasts and analyses by anti-postmodern voices, such as those echoing Lindsay's hoax revelations, where the tool exemplifies how algorithmic randomness replicates "left-normalized" discursive patterns without underlying truth conditions.^[25] This has democratized critique, allowing non-experts to produce and share counterexamples online since the mid-1990s, thereby eroding deference to opaque expertise and encouraging first-principles evaluation of claims' causal content over rhetorical flourish.^[8] However, detractors argue it oversimplifies nuanced postmodern engagements with power structures, potentially dismissing valid empirical observations on social constructs by reducing the field to caricature.^[26] Despite such charges, its enduring utility in anti-discourse lies in empirically shifting focus toward testable propositions, as hoaxes inspired by it exposed acceptance rates for ideologically conforming but substantively vacant work exceeding 20% in targeted journals during the Grievance Studies project.^[23]

Controversies and Defenses

Defenders of postmodernism have accused the Postmodernism Generator of erecting a straw man by reducing complex analyses of power dynamics, such as Michel Foucault's examinations of discourse and institutional control, to mere obfuscatory jargon without substantive content.^[27] This critique posits that the generator's outputs caricature surface-level stylistic elements while disregarding purported deeper insights into social construction and hegemony, thereby misrepresenting the field's contributions to understanding non-universal truths.^[28] Such defenses face empirical rebuttals highlighting the difficulty in distinguishing generated text from authentic postmodern scholarship. In a 1998 review of Alan Sokal's Intellectual Impostures, Richard Dawkins described the generator as producing "randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense" that is "distinguishable from the real thing only with difficulty," underscoring how algorithmic recombination of philosophical tropes yields essays mimicking published works in journals like Social Text.^[29] This aligns with Sokal's 1996 hoax, where a deliberately fabricated paper blending scientific gibberish with postmodern rhetoric was accepted and published without peer scrutiny, demonstrating tolerance for semantically vacant prose under the guise of profundity. Informal tests, including classroom exercises and online challenges, have similarly shown non-experts struggling to differentiate generator outputs from genuine articles via blind Turing-style evaluations, reinforcing claims of stylistic indistinguishability over substantive depth.^[30] The generator's reception has been politicized, with left-leaning academics and theorists decrying it as a conservative or scientistic weapon aimed at discrediting critical inquiry into metanarratives and inequality.^[22] Conversely, skeptics from scientific and right-leaning perspectives hail it as a diagnostic tool exposing epistemic relativism's corrosive effects on rational discourse, evidenced by its enduring use in critiques of academic rigor since its 1996 launch.^[8] These polarized views reflect broader institutional tensions, where mainstream humanities sources often prioritize interpretive pluralism over falsifiability, yet empirical hoaxes like Sokal's reveal vulnerabilities to parody that undermine assertions of inherent intellectual value.

Legacy and Adaptations

Enduring Online Presence

The original Postmodernism Generator, hosted at elsewhere.org/pomo/, has operated continuously since its creation in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak, utilizing the Dada Engine to produce procedurally generated essays mimicking postmodernist prose through recursive grammars and randomized phrase combinations.^[2] This setup enables the generation of theoretically infinite unique outputs, each appearing as a coherent academic paper on topics such as discourse analysis or cultural critique, without substantive content.^[12] Site metrics indicate sustained activity, with over 72 million essays delivered since tracking began on February 25, 2000, underscoring ongoing access for users seeking satirical or illustrative examples of stylistic tropes in postmodern writing.^[2] Archival snapshots via the Internet Archive preserve multiple versions of the interface and generated texts from the early 2000s onward, safeguarding functionality amid broader internet ephemerality and domain shifts. References to the generator in discussions during the 2020s, including its invocation in analyses of publication ethics and AI-generated text mimicry, highlight its role as a benchmark for detecting formulaic obscurity, evidencing the persistence of critiques against opaque academic language.^[31]^[32] This technical endurance facilitates repeated engagements for humorous deconstruction or educational purposes, reinforcing skepticism toward jargon-heavy relativism in intellectual discourse.^[2]

Modern Recreations and Updates

In 2024, Ege Mülayim developed a Python-based reimplementation of the Postmodernism Generator, utilizing a grammar-driven system to produce essays that emulate academic postmodern criticism without relying on large language models.^[33] This version draws directly from Andrew C. Bulhak's original approach, employing recursive grammars with 16 themes, 91 philosophers, and 97 concepts stored in JSON format to ensure thematic consistency and dialectical structures such as thesis-antithesis-synthesis progression.^[33] Key enhancements include customizable parameters for themes (e.g., "Digital Subjectivity") and metafiction intensity, alongside features like MLA 9-compliant citations, Markdown export, and a command-line interface, facilitating broader experimentation while preserving the core grammar fidelity of the 1996 prototype.^[33] Subsequent updates, including version 0.1.6 released on May 4, 2025, refined the footnote and citation generation for greater plausibility, with the last commit occurring on June 4, 2025.^[33] Adaptations extend to variant styles, such as art critique generators like the 2016 Spanish-language "Postmo" tool, which applies similar phrase randomization to museum commentary but lacks the essay-scale structure.^[34] Clones of the underlying Dada Engine, such as a 2011 GitHub mirror including the original "pomo.pb" script, enable direct reuse of Bulhak's grammars in modern environments without substantive alterations.^[35] These recreations enhance usability through modern programming languages and modularity, allowing empirical testing of grammar variations against original outputs to probe postmodern text generation more rigorously—evident in improved randomness algorithms and contextual coherence that better replicate evolving academic jargon without introducing probabilistic AI opacity.^[33] However, expansions like structured dialectics risk tempering the original's unfiltered absurdity, potentially diluting its stark demonstration of how simple rules yield superficially erudite nonsense; comparisons of sample essays show outputs remaining comparably opaque yet marginally more navigable, prioritizing extensibility over unaltered parody.^[33]

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