/lit/ - Literature

>>3839137
I'll elaborate.


I don't understand what post-modernism actually means. I understand it's associated with relativity and rejection of reason and suspicion of institutions, but why is it associated with mata-ness and irony. Why is liking something ironically called liking it in a "post-modern" way.

Often in facebook threads on /mu/ this image is posted, one person called it the "apex of post modernism" (obviously he's joking in calling it the apex but he obviously thought this image, or perhaps that people find this image funny, is representative of post-modernism).

So what is post-modernism and how does it relate to all these things?

http://www.examiner.com/article/what-is-postmodern-literature

Is post-modernism in literature and post-modernism as a philosophical concept separate?

bump

>>3839141
"Metaness" and irony are postmodern trends because they reflect the rejection of any sort of totalizing "truths" (which is what, according to post-modernism, modernism relied on). Basically irony becomes a more valid form of expression than "truth" because truth can't be trusted anymore. Irony and self-reference allows you to communicate while acknowledging this.

>>3839213
In other words, it allows one to communicate while acknowledging the lack of truth in that communication.

>>3839213
>>3839216
Not OP, but thanks anon, that was actually useful to me.

the incredulity towards meta-narratives

>>3839216
How would you say the original pic represents post-modernism

>>3839137
inside is yellow :)

<a href=http://www.zq558.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=5740>http://www.zq558.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=5740</a>
<a href=http://www.lh985.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=36762>http://www.lh985.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=36762</a>
<a href=http://bbs.qrieny.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=12254>http://bbs.qrieny.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=12254</a>
<a href=http://www.hzapo.com/bbs/thread-208657-1-1.html>http://www.hzapo.com/bbs/thread-208657-1-1.html</a>
<a href=http://www.my1668.com/m_bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=137689>http://www.my1668.com/m_bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=137689</a>

sorry but, can anyone, please, explain to me that joke?
i've seen it a lot on /mu/

It's Demonic.

We want pre-retrograde.

>>3839310
someone posted the OP image in one of /mu/'s facebook threads and it just happened. I can only guess that it seems funny at first because of the dumb but happy "inside is yellow :)" . the rest is self-referential humor

Further proof that /mu/ is the worst board

>>3839241
>le lyotard face
>lel yotard face

Try this for starters, OP: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

It also depends if you're talking about philosophy/theory or literature. With the latter, motifs of post-modern writing are easier to identify, and the discussion is about a specific period of time--the one that follows the modern era. Modernism in art and music is also easy to pick out in a lineup. This is why educated cacs get mad when plebs say "modern art" when they mean "contemporary art."

>>3839338
>/mu/
>worst board
ISHYGDDT

>>3839325
Wow,that's not what i expected. thanks anon.

>>3839363
what did you expect

THE RECKONING IS FAR AWAY AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE

modernism rejected mass-culture
post-modernism embraces it ironically

>>3839369
the reckoning has already happened
read your deleuze

postmodernism is when the joke becomes life itself.

>>3839363
I suppose the humor comes from the kind of nieve and "off" nature of the whole interaction.

>>3839366
something a lot better...

>>3839154
Yes

Post modernism is all about deconstructing reality. It cares little for objective truth, rather it only seeks to propel its own political agenda through the implementation of freudian pyschoanalysis and critical theory from the frankfurt school. It is a poisonous philosophical movement and its prevalence only proves how decadent our society really is.

PM is moral relativism on steroids

Postmodernism is literally everything and nothing.

Bump

>>3839684
psychoanalysis and the frankfurt school were thoroughly modernist theoretical moments.

next you're going to tell me "cultural marxism" is a real thing

>>3839213
this

>>3839137

It's mumbo jumbo. A lie. It is modernism with a mask.

When you read the instructions and side effects on a bottle of medicine, you don't think it is all relative, right? No, you trust it as objective truth.

Therefore, postmodernism does not exist. It is just a facade for modernism. That is: that in matters of technology, engineering and science, objectivity is not only possible but desirable; and that the rest of things, those which we cannot know for certain with our 5 senses, are a matter of taste.

So, there you go, in a nutshell, the lie of postmodernism. It is just mental masturbation for feeble minds.

>>3840088
>When you read the instructions and side effects on a bottle of medicine, you don't think it is all relative, right? No, you trust it as objective truth.

are you trolling
is this a troll
are you a troll

>>3840133

Go away, kid.

>>3840088
>When you read the instructions and side effects on a bottle of medicine, you don't think it is all relative, right? No, you trust it as objective truth.

>>3840170

Awful pic, kid. You should wait it to grow naturally.

>>3840088
Why do people post criticisms of a reductive version of a theory or field instead of an actual criticism? Don't they ever think that perhaps it's more complex than that? Also why can't people just be positive and talk about what stuff they find interesting instead of going down the easy polemical route.

Postmodernism, in my experience of it, isn't talking about the relation between the writing on the packet and reality. It's talking about our relationship to those symbols, how we grant legitimacy and objectivity to a pharmaceutical label and not other things. People say "well knowledge may be subjective but it makes planes fly" and postmodernism is not questioning that, it's questioning how that knowledge arose (which is not through an unmediated experience of objective reality by agents of pure reason but the creativity of a cultural system.) Whether or not the side effects correspond to the medical reality is irrelevant to postmodernism, because it isn't relevant to our subjective experience of reality. What is relevant is understanding how this subjective experience is formed.

(my captcha is "constructed pemigni", I think captcha is realising the value of de-essentialising this "pemigni" and recognising it as purely a social construct)

>>3840230
*just be 'more' positive
sorry, sounds like I'm saying you shouldn't mention anything in a negative light

Post-modernism is a spook

>>3840230
>>postmodernism is not questioning that, it's questioning how that knowledge arose

... which confirms that postmodernism is, as an intellectual construction and as a body of thought, bland and porous, i.e. pap.

Epistemology has been quite a while among us with its very clear rules, just for a narrative device, a fuzzy and morphing "school of thought" to even dream of shaking the foundations of how we perceive reality.

Sorry, I am not in the mood for being nice, but I am not negative. I am simply rejecting postmodernism as something defined and structured enough.

rejects the grand narrative
often ironic and sardonic
rejects linear story structure
pretty much rejects everything about pre-modernism that modernism didn't

>>3840251

Well put. So, it pretty much enables any random, untalented Timmy to be a writer.

Postmodernism is that: the democratization (and henceforth bastardization) of art.

It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It is just what it is.

>>3840263
not at all. go read romeo and juliet and jerk off

>>3840248
I think postmodernism can be very necessary and a useful tool. For example Foucault's work looking at how Enlightenment epistemology was such a powerful force of control and injustice through it's use of the legitimacy of objectivity (the persecution of the mentally ill, the pathologizing of homosexuals).

I agree that postmodernism is something ill-defined, probably because it's roots are in a negation of the traditions that came before it and a lot of it can seem like a rejection without anything positive to stand for.

>>3840273

I would not say it has nothing positive to stand for. On the contrary, I believe that it is an enabler towards the demystification of literature as a profession and as a valid path to find answers. It also brings into freedom to writers and themes which were before seen as mundane.

It is just that, as you correctly put it, it is ill-defined. I also think that, due to its nature as an approach to knowledge, it will remain as such.

>>3840251
I think postmodernism also rejected some of the novel ideas of modernism, such as the idea of the stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf, which was a kind of plunge inwards into the subject, whereas in something like a Pynchon book there is this explosion outwards into the world, the subject is nothing but their relation to this dense, hyper-connected world around them.

/lit/:

>Has Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainboew, etc as favorite books

> Proceed to bash on post-modernism

Goddamnit /lit/

>>3840291

/lit/ is not a uniform flock.

Search for guidance somewhere else.

>>3839325
And then it turned into the Apex of post-modernism.
I don't know where this came from but a ton of people have started calling it that.

>>3840312
They're plebs who don't know what they're talking about. Post-modernism isn't a synonym for

>lel so random *holds up spork of doom*

people do the same thing with surrealism

>>3840332
I know, I just wanted to tell him why it's always related to post-modernalism

Philosophy trying to come to grips with itself in the face of the 16 trillion.

Except for Lacan, I don't think he really cared about jews.

>>3840332
Does the fact that the "lel so randum" humor has taken root in our culture reflect post-modernisms effect on our culture though?