Some pseudo-intellectualism shit invented in france by people who wear sweater vests and chain smoke.
Results 1 to 20 of 35
What exactly *is* Post-Modernism, and why does it annoy me?
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?
Some pseudo-intellectualism shit invented in france by people who wear sweater vests and chain smoke.
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?
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.
man thats true though. all of them were like maudlin frenchmen that dropped out from some communist moonbat sect and then turned overtly cynical
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
but thats why theyre so good
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
there is no such thing as "pomo" its a shitty slur invented by boring neckberds in trotskyist and stalinist sects
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
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.
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
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:
No kidding. Criticism of postmodernism is itself...postmodernist...
Mind=blown
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...
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-...rsity-students
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
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.
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.
Until now, the left has only managed capital in various ways; the point, however, is to destroy it.
"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.
Socialist Party of Outer Space
"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), which would have also served as a damning polemic against all shades of reformist social democracy?
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
So basically yr. conflating all of post-modernism with Hardt and Negri?
Until now, the left has only managed capital in various ways; the point, however, is to destroy it.
"Common" wasn't coughed up by those two hacks, and neither was "precarity."
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
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:
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:
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.
Put capitalism in a bag of rice.
I dunno, Foucault seems easier to understand than something like Jacques Camatte, at least to me.
Until now, the left has only managed capital in various ways; the point, however, is to destroy it.
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.
Put capitalism in a bag of rice.
