What exactly *is* Post-Modernism, and why does it annoy me?

[Dumb]

Of course, there's the chance that it's not Postmodernism per se, but rather a select few of its self-declared proponents, that get on my nerves...and there's certainly the chance that I haven't a clue what I'm talking about.

Anyway, would anybody care to explain?

[Red Noob]

Some pseudo-intellectualism shit invented in france by people who wear sweater vests and chain smoke.

[Franz Fanonipants]

Of course, there's the chance that it's not Postmodernism per se, but rather a select few of its self-declared proponents, that get on my nerves...and there's certainly the chance that I haven't a clue what I'm talking about.

Anyway, would anybody care to explain?

Derrida Sucks.

Read Foucault. Esp. History of Sexuality - an Introduction. Understand that all knowledge is historically constructed and contingent, which is hopefully what you already understand.

Don't listen to dudes *****ing about "Some French idiots" because I can almost gd guarantee you that they don't know what they're talking about.

[Dumb]

Derrida Sucks.

Read Foucault. Esp. History of Sexuality - an Introduction. Understand that all knowledge is historically constructed and contingent, which is hopefully what you already understand.

Don't listen to dudes *****ing about "Some French idiots" because I can almost gd guarantee you that they don't know what they're talking about.

I'd read Discipline and Punish, which I loved, but never really thought of Foucault as a Postmodernist; then again, this was three years ago, before I'd even touched Marx. (US education strikes again!)

Also, where does Postmodernism lie relative to Marxism, anarchism, socialism, etc.? Is there any relationship, and if so, what is it?

[Franz Fanonipants]

a lot of the postmodernists came from marxism. from my understanding.

and yeah dude, Foucault is king poststructuralism as far as history goes. idk if Foucault saw himself as poststructuralist, but for sure he's one of the bigger influences on contemporary poststructuralism.

[black magick hustla]

Don't listen to dudes *****ing about "Some French idiots" because I can almost gd guarantee you that they don't know what they're talking about.

man thats true though. all of them were like maudlin frenchmen that dropped out from some communist moonbat sect and then turned overtly cynical

[bcbm]

but thats why theyre so good

[black magick hustla]

there is no such thing as "pomo" its a shitty slur invented by boring neckberds in trotskyist and stalinist sects

[black magick hustla]

skip delueze and guittari tho they are def. wank. focault does have something ton say. derrida is interesting if u realize that what he said is really not that novel but ppl like him because he makes those silly word games and obscures a lot of what might be an interesting thesis - i.e. a mystifcation of wittgensteins thesis that "language is the world" and that it is impossible to understand things outside your particular way of life/language game etc. i generally dont bother with people who's work derive from lacan because he was a notorious charlatan/wanker. a lot of that french shit is notorious for obscurantism but "pomos" arent the only ones to blame - badiou who is a "modernist" is a pretty much wank.

[hatzel]

As has been mentioned, there isn't really such a thing as post-modernism, and definitely isn't some unified monolithic 'ideology' that can be criticised by those who say 'post-modernism is stupid,' that is to say 'this figment of my imagination, this ideology I have myself created and assigned to these numerous and varied thinkers, is stupid.' If you call yourself a post-modernist, and take this self-classification seriously (that is to say, if you are a 'self-declared proponent' of post-modernism), then chances are you're not 'one.' I believe the correct way to address oneself in such a situation is 'I have been accused of post-modernism, and may be inclined to refute these allegations. I admit, however, to not being particularly enamoured by so-called "modernist" - though I do not necessarily commit to defining them as such - currents of thought' or something like that...

To get an idea of just how nonsensical this all obviously is, let's just quote a little summin-summin from Wikipedia's article on Transmodernism:


Transmodernism is a philosophical and cultural movement which was founded by Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, a critic of postmodernism who instead refers to himself as a transmodernist and wrote a series of essays criticising the postmodern theory and advocating a transmodern way of thinking. Transmodernism is a development in thought following the periodisation of postmodernism (as a matter of fact, transmodern thought is often labelled as a variant of postmodernism).No kidding. Criticism of postmodernism is itself...postmodernist...

Mind=blown :lol:

As for why it annoys you...probably because loads of annoying people say it's annoying. And loads of other people who don't really know anything about anything falsely use it to refer to themselves. In a totally non-ironic fashion, of course...

[Os Cangaceiros]

I read an introduction to Foucault once, and honestly I found some of his thought very difficult to understand. I don't consider myself to be stupid, either. His historical justifications for some of his ideas seemed sloppily researched and Eurocentric, too (for example, humanity's treatment of the insane). Although sometimes when the subject of prisons pops up I'll reference some of his ideas on the subject.

someone posted this elsewhere, I thought it was kind of funny:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/vice-guide-to-critical-theory-university-students

[Jimmie Higgins]

Also, where does Postmodernism lie relative to Marxism, anarchism, socialism, etc.? Is there any relationship, and if so, what is it?

Post-modernism is a group of various movements in philosophy and the arts that gained support after WWII and are loosely connected by a rejection of the idea of objective understanding of the world.

I think in general it is counter-posed to anarchism and Marxism because if you reject the idea of some universality or progress or a more or less objective material reality then workers don't have common cause and a worker-run society would be no better or worse than a capitalist society. In fact many post-modernist thinkers either explicitly reject Marxism or uphold Marxism while rejecting the centrality of class.

I think if you look at this movement through a materialist lens then it's clear that these ideas developed and gained influence in times of low struggle when intellectuals were disillusioned with both liberal bourgeois ideas of progress and technological achievement (industrial genocide in Germany and technological mass-destruction through atomic weapons). When confronted with Stalinist hypocracy and lies on the one hand and bourgoise hypocracy and lies on the other, intellectuals responded by saying: "there is no such thing as truth". And without independent worker's struggles to point to an alternative to cold-war politics along with a long post-war boom and "labor-peace" in the US, intellectuals also stopped seeing the working class as important - unless as defenders of the status-quo.

Personally I see post-modernism as part of modernism - its bad hangover that is. Intellectuals woke up after the devastation of WWII and thought "I'll never do THAT again!".

Some interesting art and some insights came out of post-modernism, but I think the basic assumptions that are generally accepted by post-modernists are incorrect and pessimistic. They argue that there is no truth or objective so the only thing to do is to play with signifiers, play with language and symbols. Typically pomo art has no viewpoint, just regurgitates things back to us and adds no insight. It's also just part of the establishment machine now so any edge or insight it might have had at some points are totally muted.

Big galleries host shows of "institutional critique" and pomo theories are just garbled-gook so meaningless that consciously fraudulent articles have been published and accepted by Academic Journals without anyone realizing that it was intentionally meaningless academic jargon. It's a great philosophy for liberal arts academics because you don't need to actually add new insight or knowledge to publish you can just reinterpret or re-contextualize or whatnot and in a real way that helps academics in the modern cut-throat competition in universities.

But even among academics there's a lot of talk about what comes "after post-modernism" and that we are "beyond post-modernity" now. I think that that's them acknowledging some of the uselessness of post-modern ideas, but they don't know what will replace it. In my view, that's because ideas and philosophy doesn't change itself, there's an interaction with the material world. Modernism developed out of the changing ideas brought on by industrialization and eventually became what is known as post-modernism because of historical events and changes in class forces and post-modernist ideas will also change because there's a new changes in the world to interpret. The uprisings of 2011 have probably done more to contribute to that process than the last 20 years of academic theory.

[ed miliband]

I read an introduction to Foucault once, and honestly I found some of his thought very difficult to understand. I don't consider myself to be stupid, either. His historical justifications for some of his ideas seemed sloppily researched and Eurocentric, too (for example, humanity's treatment of the insane). Although sometimes when the subject of prisons pops up I'll reference some of his ideas on the subject.

someone posted this elsewhere, I thought it was kind of funny:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/vice-guide-to-critical-theory-university-students

Didja get that from me brah?

I've never properly read any Foucault, though I've read a few books about him and a lot of it appeals to me, plus he seemed fucking cool. I'm meant to read him for most of the modules I take but... never got 'round to it. One of my best academic moments was when I had to do a presentation on deviance in early modern Europe and I didn't want to analyse primary sources so I made up some bullshit about using Foucault to develop a theoretical framework to study the topic at hand, then I bullshitted a bit about Silvia Federici doing this, etc, etc. Managed to get a first despite it being a load of toss.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

"Post-modernists" do make some interesting arguments and the theories which they come up with are excellent at critiquing our understanding and use of language, and how it shapes our theories.

For instance, Derrida made an interesting argument regarding the cultural ownership over language. As an Algerian Jew who grew up surrounded by French and "French culture" during the decolonization period, he had no language of his own. French, Arabic and Hebrew were all on some level foreign languages. No matter what language he used, his words would be the words spoken of someone speaking in an alien tongue which few would recognize him taking ownership over. It was an interesting argument about the social and political ramifications of cultural hegemony and the notion that people have ownership over languages because of a particular historical origin. And Foucault of course wrote Discipline and Punish, which has become one of the best attempts to understand the historical components of the modern justice system.

It should also be noted that most of the people described as post-modernists were or are actually radical leftists of some type. Their leftism might be too "idealist" for some hardcore materialist Marxists but IMO it has value in attacking the ideological building blocks of the hegemonic culture. Their arguments are based on history, but also the subtext in art, language, and social ontology, and the issues here are important to raise.

The bigger problem with the "post-modernists" are not the actual thinkers themselves but the swarm of later folks who go on to interpret everything through the prism of the earlier thinkers. The same thing happened with Hegelians and Marxists however.

[Die Neue Zeit]

"Precarity" has been the only positive concept to come out of the post-modernists, and even then there are problems. "Multitude" is pathetic way beyond the reason Jimmy Higgins said above (rejection of class).

"Common" sounds like a concept far detached from worker issues. Why didn't they rehabilitate res publica and place it in an economic context (Economic Republicanism (http://www.wcrforum.com/showthread.php?tid=251)), which would have also served as a damning polemic against all shades of reformist social democracy?

[ed miliband]

"Precarity" has been the only positive concept to come out of the post-modernists, and even then there are problems. "Multitude" is pathetic way beyond the reason Jimmy Higgins said above (rejection of class).

"Common" sounds like a concept far detached from worker issues. Why didn't they rehabilitate res publica and place it in an economic context (Economic Republicanism (http://www.wcrforum.com/showthread.php?tid=251)), which would have also served as a damning polemic against all shades of reformist social democracy?

So basically yr. conflating all of post-modernism with Hardt and Negri?

[Die Neue Zeit]

"Common" wasn't coughed up by those two hacks, and neither was "precarity."

[The Douche]

One time somebody called me a postmodernist, so I thought "uh, maybe?", and I went to our bookshelf and looked through my girlfriend's books from when she was a philosophy student, I found something by fouccalt, I read three pages, and made this face:

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqrk3jZMCt1qm6aqbo1_100.png

And then I put the book on the coffee table and never touched it again. When my girl was cleaning she saw it, asked if I had been reading it, I asked if she could explain anything from it, and she made this face:

http://philosophistry.com/scans/2010/lol-face.jpg



Now, I'm not the smartest dude, and I have problems with critical reading, but this shit went so far over my head that I literally thought it was a joke, and my girl, with 2+ years of university level philosophy education told me that she couldn't explain it to me, and that when she was reading it for class she thought about coming to me for help with it.

[ed miliband]

I dunno, Foucault seems easier to understand than something like Jacques Camatte, at least to me.

[The Douche]

I dunno, Foucault seems easier to understand than something like Jacques Camatte, at least to me.

I think I understand Camatte better because 1) I came from marxism when reading his works and had read other anti-civ shit, and 2) I relate to his positions.

I have no background in philosophy, really. I'm a high school dropout, and not particularly well educated, so when I try to read philosophy I feel lost in the mix.

[Enragé]

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

CLICK ITTTT!

THEN CLICK IT AGAIN!


more seriously: the 'best' postmodernism there is simply states that our society is 'postmodern' rather than 'modern' because of an incredible increase in communication channels directed at each individual (i.e tv, internet, etc). This ofcourse is true, and is reminiscent in some respects of the 'spectacle' the situationists talk about, although in this strand of postmodernism all critique, or value judgement, is ofcourse eliminated.

Other postmodern things i've come across:
- Reality is always apprehended fractured, i.e you cannot come to a total understanding
- There is no objectivity
- Everything is 'discourse'

As i see it, postmodernism is actually correct on many points (i.e there is no objectivity, just some things about which there exists an almost total intersubjectivity, which we then misdefine as objective), the end problem however lies in that it can only deconstruct, not construct. Moreover, it questions everything, except questioning EVERYTHING.

The problem is that there is no link between theory and practice possible whatsoever in postmodernism. This is not because postmodernism is evil, but because it is the product of 'evil' conditions. It is simply thought divorced from practice brought to its logical conclusion: i know nothing. Or more accurately: i can not know nothing. So this 'knowing nothing' cannot even be the start of any wisdom, because it means you can never know anything. period.

---
Foucault is not postmodern. He inspired postmodernism, true, especially through his use of 'discourse' in explaining everything. If you closely read his History of Sexuality, however, you see that 'discourse' for Foucault does not have the meaning (or at least he does not apply it as merely such) of only text or speach or blabla in any other way that the postmodernists often make it into. For foucault, 'discourse' can just as well be a set of practices. Therein ofcourse lies his greatest fault, that he equates blabla with action, but at least he still takes account of action whereas in postmodernism blabla is a form of action and action mere TEXT.

ugh.

[Rocky Rococo]

Post-modernism is a catchall basin into which are tossed all the cultural expressions of the entropic decay of the crumbling order built on the rationalist enlightenment. It's annoying because it offers no future and makes a point of showing off the fact that the past is trash, at best recyclable in bits and pieces.

[Zanthorus]

I dunno, Foucault seems easier to understand than something like Jacques Camatte, at least to me.

Like cmoney said, Camatte isn't as difficult as he first appears if you have a basic grasp of Marx's work, particularly since one of his major works is an explication of the importance of Marx's definition of capital as self-valorising value.

[hatzel]

Part of me wants to believe that some of these writers intentionally suspend the certainty of comprehension. Perhaps to more obviously push meaning outwards to the reader, by forcing them to consciously interpret what is placed before them, rather than merely reading an already formulated argument with a single interpretation. I know Lacan seemed to like playing that game, based on some psychoanalytic (I guess) idea of the significant stuff being the unsaid and the ambiguous and stuff like that, the bridging of gaps or I don't exactly remember the justification, so all this about finding the texts difficult to understand may be part of the text itself, the stylistic presentation of the idea a fundamental part of the idea, to ensure the reader assumes the role of active creator of meaning, rayher than merely a passive receiver.

[ed miliband]

Part of me wants to believe that some of these writers intentionally suspend the certainty of comprehension. Perhaps to more obviously push meaning outwards to the reader, by forcing them to consciously interpret what is placed before them, rather than merely reading an already formulated argument with a single interpretation. I know Lacan seemed to like playing that game, based on some psychoanalytic (I guess) idea of the significant stuff being the unsaid and the ambiguous and stuff like that, the bridging of gaps or I don't exactly remember the justification, so all this about finding the texts difficult to understand may be part of the text itself, the stylistic presentation of the idea a fundamental part of the idea, to ensure the reader assumes the role of active creator of meaning, rayher than merely a passive receiver.

Didn't Roland Barthes write something along those lines?

[Belleraphone]

Postmodernism is whatever the hell you want it to be, because you're being postmodern!

[Lucretia]

Jimmie Higgins is essentially correct here. Postmodernism encompasses a variety of literary, artistic, semiotic, and philosophic theories all basically critiquing "modernism" for its belief in progress and in the reliability of knowledge.

[The Man]

In it's basic form, Post-Modernism is the philosophy that things exist depending on what you believe is real. Bluntly, Post-Modernists would say "It depends on your opinion if things exist or not."

You wanna know how to disprove them? Easy. Slap them in the face, and ask if your hand is real or not.

[the last donut of the night]

fuck i hate vice but that article was hilarious

[the last donut of the night]

i am so fucked for college

[Franz Fanonipants]

In it's basic form, Post-Modernism is the philosophy that things exist depending on what you believe is real. Bluntly, Post-Modernists would say "It depends on your opinion if things exist or not."

You wanna know how to disprove them? Easy. Slap them in the face, and ask if your hand is real or not.

lets hear it for the revleft intellectual squad

[Franz Fanonipants]

i am so fucked for college

bro if you understand marxism you are already good at working in mental frameworks so

[The Douche]

In it's basic form, Post-Modernism is the philosophy that things exist depending on what you believe is real. Bluntly, Post-Modernists would say "It depends on your opinion if things exist or not."

You wanna know how to disprove them? Easy. Slap them in the face, and ask if your hand is real or not.

Isn't that the same as existenialism?

[hatzel]

Didn't Roland Barthes write something along those lines?

Indeed he did. In the process asking serious questions of what it means to be an 'author' after the death of the author; one can't exactly approach writing as one would whilst s_he who writes was still considered primal.


Isn't that the same as existenialism?

Whilst it is true that 'postmodernism' draws heavily from the so-called 'existentialist' thinkers, and as such certain elements may have a passing resemblance, the issue here (and I feel this is what you were hinting at) is that the Man's overview of 'postmodernism' was unfortunately crude. Not least because it seems to attempt to reduce the current to a position of radical subjectivity (at least this is how I understand his comments), totally overlooking the 'postmodern' criticism of the subject, and thus subjectivity.

[StalinFanboy]

I read Tiqqun.


A lot.