/lit/ - Literature

>>4123411
Is that pic postmodernist?

What the fuck even is postmodernism? Anons slang that term around a bunch but I've never seen anyone give a concrete definition for it.

>>4123417
There isn't a solid, agreed-upon definition besides a movement coming after modernism.

hopefully. all of that masturbatory self-indulgent sophist shit has been caked and dried into huge towers by the sun over the centuries and it's about time we tore them down.

you should be worrying more about whether we can rebuild anew.

>>4123411
The fire has run its course. Philosophy and history survived. Literary, film And cultural criticism are buried outside sacred ground.

>>4123417
The idea that everything before postmodernism was flawed because of biases and misconceptions people had, racism and sexism being big ones, but on a deeper level, it was the binarity and realization that statements we take as givens like "up = positive, down = negative, light = positive, dark = negative" have no actual basis in anything.

>>4123417
Post-modernism is less an intellectual movement and more a political movement, intended to destroy the intellectual basis of western civilization, delegitimizing the institutions (by playing outside their game) and paving the way for an organized group's takeover.

There isn't intellectual coherence between "postmodern" thinkers because there isn't supposed to be one.

>>4123425
Is that what post-modernism is all about?
What a bunch of fucking pretentious asses.
What they propose is literally nothing new.

>>4123432
People have a hard time differentiating between the point of postmodernism and how it goes about making this point.

>>4123417
There's no definition because if they spoke clearly you'd realize there's nothing behind what they say.

Take for example:
"We are unquestionably indebted to this physically pleasing sensation: the sentiment that collective or individual events are plunged into a hole of memory. This debility, no doubt, is due to a movement in reverse, to this parabolic curve interjected into the space of history."
Which means absolutely nothing, but there's enough misplaced scientific language to make it seem smart to the unaware person.

>>4123425
>there is no objective truth but anyone before postmodernism is wrong
>let's say there are biases in the most pedantic way and we'll look smart

>>4123453
Reminder not to kill the messenger.

There's no such thing as Postmodernism. There is only a crisis in modernism.

>>4123425
>>4123432
>>4123452

Ok, that helps. But what's postmodernism as a literary movement? Modernism, as I understand (and read) it, was characterized by authors casting away literary "traditions" and norms.

In fact, pretty much all modernist art can be summarized with the above, and that speaks to its legitimacy as a cultural movement.

Whenever I visit Moscow, for example, I can clearly identify the modernist architectural elements of the city's subway stations. And when I read a story by Kafka or a play by Pirandello, I can clearly discern which elements of form were omitted/subverted in order to affect the work in a particular way.

But what did postmodernism do? (Postmodernism is dead, I think). What does a photograph of a man urinating on the cross do?

I feel so pleb asking this, but quite a few English faculty at my university claim that they absolutely love postmodern literature.

>>4123494
Postmodernism is basically just an extension of modernism; modernist literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness always existed (the soliloquys in Greek plays, Shakespeare's plays, the writing of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu), but was never properly "realized" so to speak, because writers felt like they either had to be playwrights, or realists, or romanticists or whatever. Modernists thought this restricted the full experience of life. Ulysses has been called the most important modernist text because of how it basically puts all of these techniques together in the aim of representing human life as fully as possible: there's realism, there's romanticism, stream-of-consciousness, parts are written as a play, as a newspaper, as everything.

Similarly, postmodernist literature is just the literature becoming even more self-conscious. In a sense, this has always existed. It's like Thersites's speech in the Iliad, the entirety of Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote. Postmodernism is basically this self-consciousness (which at its most extends into metafiction) along with the rejection that any art can actually represent life.

>>4123504
fuck, that's the best description i've ever read of postmodern literature

>>4123453
>i'll just reject everything because i am the smartest man in the world

>>4123507
Of course, it's only a rough approximation of a trend in academia/literature from 60s onwards. Postmodernism exists the same way that grunge existed (which is to say, it didn't exist at all).

>>4123504
That's a pretty insightful post.

Have this picture of post-soviet realist architecture as "thanks"!

>>4123494
>Postmodernists see representation and reality as overlapping because conventions of representation or language ('signification') are learned and internalize so that we experience them as real. Especially in an age when television and the other mass media play such a significant role in creating human consciousness, what we perceive as real is revealed to be always present in and filtered through representation. The term 'simulacrum' - drawn from the writings of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard - is often used to signify this idea of representation as reality. For the postmodernist, then, nothing we can do or say is truly 'original', for our thoughts are constructed from our experience of a lifetime of representation, so it is naive to imagine a work's author inventing its forms or controlling its meaning. Instead of pretending to an authoritative originality, postmodernism concentrates on the way images and symbols ('signifiers') shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts ('appropriated'), revealing ('deconstructing') the processes by which meaning is constructed. And because no set of signifiers, from art to advertising, is original, all are implicated in the ideologies (themselves patterns of language or representation, hence, 'discourses') of the cultures that produce and/or interpret them.

tl;dr people have always interpreted and represented things differently and those interpretations shape future interpretations. sometimes a consensus is reached (culture)

>>4123510
>pointing out logical inconsistencies is rejecting everything
you're a good postmodernist

>>4123532
unfortunately no postmodernist would ever say something is 'wrong' so you're simply misrepresenting the argument

>>4123535
>no postmodernist would ever say something is 'wrong'
>"everything before postmodernism was flawed because of biases and misconceptions people had"
>mis·con·cep·tion : A view or opinion that is incorrect because based on faulty thinking or understanding.
>incorrect
But i don't blame you, as >>4123452 said, if postmodernists used actual definitions it would be obvious that it's just bullshit.

>>4123546
flawed? are they a faulty form of human expression? are they not legitimate?

>>4123546
What do you mean when you say 'postmodernists'? The people posting in /lit/? Which postmodern texts have you read that don't define their terms? What's so bullshit about >>4123531 ?

>>4123548
I'm just using the definition someone else gave m8, which is pretty much what postmodernists really beleive anyway.

>>4123551
ok well you should read more books instead of shitposting about concepts you don't understand

>>4123535


god i hate them so much, but ill give them credit insofar as theyve managed to exploit something thats very real (of course they cant admit that), their impact on society is undeniable.


just the other day i was having a conversation with a friend about different thematic elements in vidya, he basically said 'i dont like x, but its not bad'. that sort of cognitive dissonance is only possible through these equalitarian mind viruses.

>>4123550
>What do you mean when you say 'postmodernists'? The people posting in /lit/? Which postmodern texts have you read that don't define their terms?
Derrida, Heidegger, Baudrillard.

>What's so bullshit about >>4123531 ?
He forgot to mention that postmodernists say there isn't a reality outside of that representation. They also defend relativism: aka if we are against female genital mutilation in islam we are ethnocentric. Not to mention it leads to the most retarded epistemology possible where for example modern medicine is as valid as tribal or pseudoscientific medicine. Etc.

>>4123548
>"legitimacy" and "form of human expression" as a measure of the validity of an idea
i cry for humanity

>>4123452

Lel

Who wrote that?

>>4123565
>Derrida, Heidegger, Baudrillard.
Again, which texts?

>He forgot to mention that postmodernists say there isn't a reality outside of that representation.

So that makes the entirety of the definition false? How? What is the reality outside of representation?

>They also defend relativism: aka if we are against female genital mutilation in islam we are ethnocentric.

How is that not true? It doesn't mean that postmodernists are advocates for genital mutilation.

>Not to mention it leads to the most retarded epistemology possible where for example modern medicine is as valid as tribal or pseudoscientific medicine.

If they both work then yes they are as valid as each other. The important factor is that they both fulfill a societal role as a 'medicine' regardless of how the culture has constructed that idea.

>>4123571
are they not?

>>4123581

>'I'm representing something which is actually nothing'

>'why is ignorance bad?'

So deep. So contrarian. So edgy.

The point is that these people don't seem to establish axioms.

pomo is something you have to feel first.

>>4123599
It's not 'nothing' you dingus. Representation is reality.

>>4123494
the greatest work of postmodernist architecture known to man is Facebook

People namedrop Pomo as if it's a recent thing but it' actually a term for the later part of the 20th century. If anything we're in post-postmodernism, whatever that means.

>>4123603
*postmodern
http://www.uni-graz.at/the_rhizomatic_self__articulating_subjectivity_into_facebook_as_a_form_of_public_private_space.pdf

a space to construct an illusory identity based only on relativism and consumption; what more could you want?

>>4123602

By definition representation represents. What you just wrote is utterly foolish.

>>4123561
>'i dont like x, but its not bad'. that sort of cognitive dissonance is only possible through these equalitarian mind viruses.
Why so? You can like something you acknowledge is bad, same the other way around. You don't control what you like. Don't tell me you've never enjoyed some shitty commercial pop song.

>>4123581
>Again, which texts?
L'illusion de la fin, Being and Time, Writing and Difference, and of course texts trying to make sense of those because it's just incoherent babbling.

>So that makes the entirety of the definition false? How? What is the reality outside of representation?
I'm not going to play the postmodernist game of everything is valid and nothing is real. There is a reality that we can know through the scientific method, where the results are evident and falsifiables. And yes there is a representation of that reality, which can also be understood.

>How is that not true? It doesn't mean that postmodernists are advocates for genital mutilation.
You are missing the point, cultural relativism is just a form of general relativism: the truth of a statement depends completely on an individual or social groups perception.

Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

>If they both work then yes they are as valid as each other. The important factor is that they both fulfill a societal role as a 'medicine' regardless of how the culture has constructed that idea.
In postmodern philosophy "If they both work" means nothing, what's important is if the representation of individuals or social groups is that they work. Tribal people in africa think their medicine works, therefore it is as valid as modern medicine.
Again, this is so obviously wrong i'm not gonna bother with it if you disagree.

>>4123584
only in social sciences contaminated by postmodernists

>implying postmodernism hasn't already utterly gutted the liberal arts.

>>4123529
Reminds me of home. Thanks...

>>4123419
>>4123417
As I understand it, modernism is the fear that moving forward into the future is going to change all of our ideas and values so greatly that we lose them and things become incomprehensible to us as social beings.

Post-modernism holds that this has already happened and the associations we relied upon to have a functioning, normal society at any point prior to the mid-20th century have already disintegrated.

>>4123624
>nothing is real

Who said that?

>There is a reality that we can know through the scientific method

What is that reality? That which is shown through an invented method?

>You are missing the point

I'm pretty sure the point was discrediting postmodernism by associating it with advocation for genital mutilation. What exactly is your issue?

>Again, this is so obviously wrong i'm not gonna bother with it if you disagree.

I think you misunderstand the point. No postmodernist says "this particular grass cures diseases as well as modern medicine". What is your take on placebos?

>>4123614
The reality is the nature of representation. It's not a dichotomy.

>tfw people are so dumb nowadays that anything that confuses them is labelled 'postmodernism'

>>4123624
>There is a reality that we can know through the scientific method

Ever read this guy?

>>4123411
>Will postmodernism destroy what's left of serious academia?

mfw there are people who actually ask these questions

>>4123743
>Who said that?
"There is nothing outside the text" Derrida.
Most postmodernists don't say it that directly because in postmodernism the most unintelligible the better as proven by the sociological experiment in the sokal affair article.

"Student subjects were randomly separated into treatment and control groups; both groups were presented with copies of Sokal's hoax article. Those in the control condition were led to believe that it was penned by another student; those in the treatment condition were told it was written by a famous academic. The experimenters found that those subjects who believed that the author of the text was a high-status intellectual were significantly more likely to claim that the text was comprehensible, interesting and valuable. The experiment thus suggested that Sokal was correct to claim that academic status may account for the intellectual appeal of unintelligible academic texts."

>What is that reality? That which is shown through an invented method?
Reality is what philosophers would call the sensible world.
As i said: "I'm not going to play the postmodernist game of everything is valid and nothing is real.", there's no point discussing this.

>I'm pretty sure the point was discrediting postmodernism by associating it with advocation for genital mutilation. What exactly is your issue?
No i wasn't, it just shows the consequences of irrationality.

>I think you misunderstand the point. No postmodernist says "this particular grass cures diseases as well as modern medicine".
Again, that means nothing to postmodernism, there is no point in talking about how well does one cure compared to the other outside of the representation of how well it cures.

>What is your take on placebos?
An example of the representation of reality being different of the objective reality accesible through experimental data.

>>4123624
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

I don't like the continentals either, but I don't see why anybody thinks this is some kind of trump card. Anybody who looks at the facts objectively will see how meaningless it is.

A marginal journal (they refer to themselves as " non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis") published something because an established scientist submitted it. They asked him to revise it and he threatened to withdraw, so they published it on the grounds of his reputation. Who cares. Says more about institutional discourse than postmodernism.

Source: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf

>>4123785
Do you think "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense...structured around the silliest quotations he could find" would be accepted in any non postmodernist journal, threat or not?
Really there's no excuse.

Also:
>Whether Sokal’s article would have been declared substandard by a physicist peer reviewer is debatable
top lel

>>4123417
>every response had a different definition
case and point

>>4123775

Derrida got schooled by Foucault for saying that. Derrida is a pleb who reduces

>discursive practices to textual traces: the elision of events produced therein and the retention only of marks for a reading; the invention of voices behind texts to avoid having to analyze the modes of implication of the subject in discourses; the assigning of the originary as said and unsaid in the text to avoid placing discursive practices in the field of the transformations where they are carried out

>mfw people still bring up the Sokal hoax after this clusterfuck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

>>4123798
>Would a non postmodernist journal publish the editorial?

Yes. And you'll say "doubt it" and we'll have proved nothing. There are better criticisms for the continentals than that Sokal horseshit.

If the Sokal affair is a critique of anything, it's a critique of the processes and culture of academia generally, not of the tenets or claims of postmodernism or any theory.

>>4123808
The validity of the bogdanovs paper can be assessed objectively, it just wasn't. The sokal hoax is indistiguishable from the average postmodernist paper.

>>4123823
>>4123823
It's not, though.

>>4123823
>The sokal hoax is indistiguishable from the average postmodernist paper.

This statement cannot be assessed objectively. Please submit again.

actually it can be if we take 'indistinguishable' in the literal sense.

>>4123823
I think pomo academia is generally stupid, and that the standards of their journals are too lax, but "indistinguishable from the average postmodernist paper" the Sokal hoax was not. It's more ridiculous than the average, by far. Quantum gravity as a linguistic construct? Equating Zermelo-Fraenkel with the patriarchy? His claims are more audaciously nonsensical than those of postmodernists - maybe "the Devil put the dinosaurs there" creationists are this ridiculous, but even then, it's debatable.

>>4123832
It can. Take a bunch of postmodernists and make them read it and ask them if it is a real postmodernist paper of a hoax, then compare with a control group.

>>4123823
Maybe to someone unfamiliar with postmodernist papers, not unlike the Bogdanov's thoery being indistinguishable from legitimate quantum theories to laymen.

Also, you keep asserting that Post-modernism is the validation of everything, which is an inane oversimplification. It always gets me when people on 4chan deny the validity of Postmodernism. The fact that we are having this discussion anonymously on a website modeled after a Japanese image-board modeled after a Japanese BBS and communicating partially through images, quotes and hyper-links is in itself Post-modern. I can think of few things that fit that description better, in fact.

>>4123839
The fact that laymen can't tell the difference really just further proves Postmodern theory.

>>4123838
Is it more ridiculous than what >>4123452 posted? That's just how they write.

>>4123624
Wow the Sokal Affair is fascinating, thanks for that

>>4123840
this

>>4123840
>Maybe to someone unfamiliar with postmodernist papers
I doubt it looks different to anyone, except for the excess of footnotes. Then again, it can't be confirmed without an experiment so let's leave it here.

>The fact that we are having this discussion anonymously on a website modeled after a Japanese image-board modeled after a Japanese BBS and communicating partially through images, quotes and hyper-links is in itself Post-modern.
How does that remotely validate or corroborate anything that postmodernism states?

>>4123775
>"There is nothing outside the text" Derrida.

I mean do you have like some sort of argument that isn't just a quote without context? Maybe some sort of explanation?

>in postmodernism the most unintelligible the better as proven by the sociological experiment in the sokal affair article.
>in postmodernism

No I don't think a bias towards authority is particular to postmodernism.

>Reality is what philosophers would call the sensible world.

The sensible world is the sensible world. A rock is not reality. Neither is a tree.

>nothing is real.

Who said that?

>it just shows the consequences of irrationality.

What exactly was the consequence? You've mentioned relativity but you haven't really made a stand on it. What's your issue with it?

>there is no point in talking about how well does one cure compared to the other outside of the representation of how well it cures.

That's why we're not discussing it. What is your issue? Where did you read a postmodern comparison of medicines?

>>4123843
No, see, pomo people use a bunch of vague words to construct sentences with no concrete meaning. Sokal did that, of course, but he also put in stuff about how the axiom of equality (a mathematical concept) is a reflection of nineteenth-century social liberalism.

He didn't just submit something as ridiculous as what he saw, because then he wouldn't have proven anything about the review process - it accepts articles of the same quality as the ones it publishes? Given the way a journal works, that's basically a tautology. He submitted something even more ridiculous, so that the lax review standards would be definitively exposed.

>>4123878
It's staggering that you think the Sokal affair somehow dismisses all postmodern thought.

>>4123878
The axiom of equality is as unrelated to social liberalism as euclidean geometry is with history, yet Baudrillard uses euclidean geometry to talk about history all the time and is one of the most important postmodernists. What's the difference?

Anyway, i'm off to sleep.

>>4123855
>I doubt it looks different to anyone
That just makes it even more Postmodern. If you're right, Sokal unintentionally validated Postmodern discourse by proving that people really can't tell fact from fiction anymore, and that life really has become that complicated. It's still a bad piece of writing, though.

>How does that remotely validate or corroborate anything that postmodernism states?
A website imported from Japan and rebranded as American is one way. Images being privileged over material is another. We are simulating verbal debate and retrieving information without actually doing much more than moving our fingers. The fact that you linked an article on the Sokal affair and claimed it to be the base of discussion, when there is actually a complex structure at play, which is further complicated by our means of communication, which don't inherently trump the content of our discussion, is another way.

I'm by no means an expert on Postmodernism. Everything I "know" I learned from a semester long course in high school 2 years ago.

>>4123729
Oh fuck nigga I'm a postmodernist wtf

>>4123751

What dichotomy are you talking about?

There is a reality represented to us through our senses which we represent to one another through natural and formal language.

If you doubt the senses and you have no desire to clarify communication, then you have no place in philosophy. What use would there be in communicating with you?

>>4123845
There's absolutely nothing fascinating about it other than that people think it actually proved anything.

>>4123887
I think you misunderstood my point. If you follow the quote trail back:
>Person A points out that science has its hoaxes, too, by posting the Bogdanov Affair
>Person B says that the Bogdanov Affair could have been objectively diagnosed as incorrect but simply wasn't, while the Sokal paper is typical of postmodern pieces
>I come in and argue that the Sokal paper is not typical of postmodern pieces

I'm basically saying that the Sokal paper does NOT invalidate all of pomo. I'm merely voicing my dislike for pomo at the same time.

>>4123898
>There is a reality represented to us

Ah, so reality is representation. I thought so.

>>4123839
You don't see the gaping holes in that kind of study? What defines a "postmodernist"? Will you give them 13 point self-evaluations like the evolutionary psychologists?

>>4123889
Good night, anon. It was nice talking to you.

>>4123892
>pomo has standards so low they can't distinguish a real paper from a fake one, therefore fiction can't be told apart from reality
Try taking a logic course instead of a pomo one next time, this is painful.
Anyway, now i'm really gone, bye.

>>4123432
>>4123411
>>4123419

Christopher Butler's "postmodernism" is an excellent book hashing out an intro to what postmodernism usually means in different contexts, i enjoyed it long after i knew what pomo is

>>4123624
>Being and Time
Is this classified as postmodern? I always thought this was exempted from that classification by virtue of its earlier date.

Either way, it's awful - like, Kierkegaard may be fucking annoying to get through, but at least he's INTERESTING - but I've just never thought of it as technical pomo.

>>4123906
Same here, good night.

>>4123729

We are communicating using grammar, lexicon, syntax, etc.

If all of our 'ideas and values' are incomprehensible then why are you even using the basic rules of language to communicate with me? It looks like coherency is still broadly valued.

>>4123914
Exhibit A

>>4123903
Poetically speaking, but then you would be comitting a reification fallacy. I'm not to keen on sophistry.

>>4123916

Do you have something to say about slang and memes?

Let me ask you; if you were applying for a white color job and you were being interviewed by an 60 year old manager would you start spouting memes as a form of communication?

>>4123910
That isn't what I meant but I'm clearly not good enough at this to help you see opposing viewpoints.

Anyway you're asleep. Hope you find someone adept enough who can explain this to you eventually, but I'm starting to think it might be closer to porn than a joke. Jokes operate on logic, but if you weren't imprinted from the right experiences, you aren't going to enjoy vore or tentacle rape no matter how eloquently they're explained.

I don't really like this trend of /lit/ shitting on a bunch of thinkers just because they were confused while reading them.

You might have valid reasons for disliking a certain book or idea, but if you don't make your case w/ examples and cogent arguments you're just setting precedent for bullshit artist teenagers to shout "the emperor has no clothes!" to each other ad nauseam which is kind of what this place has turned into.

>>4123926
It was a joke.

>>4123889
Baudrillard doesn't say shit like, "The obtuse angle was used in geometry more and more in the twentieth century, reflecting how contemporary qualities of incomprehension and insensitivity."

Sokal doesn't just try and relate disparate topics through vague stuff about interpolating various transgressions of classical transcendence or some other bullshit. He links them flat-out without any of the verbose sophistry. Hell, the axiom of "equality"=liberalism thing is the equivalent of a wink at the audience. He put puns into his hoax. The journal even asked him to remove parts, including that, which were so ridiculous that they got noticed. That alone basically demonstrates that his paper WAS noticeably more bizarre. It's just that when he said "no," they didn't dispute the matter. Because they were a fucking terrible bunch of editors.

>>4123939
Fuck, meant to delete the "how" in that not-Baudrillard line.

I think that means it's time to turn in.

>>4123935

Don't worry. I laughed. I could imagine some Pomo /lit/fag spouting an incomprehensible string of memes and jargon during an important job interview.

>>4123529
Looks like homecity.

>>4123494
>Modernism, as I understand (and read) it, was characterized by authors casting away literary "traditions" and norms.
Read T.S Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent.

>>4123755

>tfw people are so in denial nowadays that anything that confuses them is pushed off as being labelled 'postmodernist'

>>4123926
>a white color job
Huehue hue huo hee hoo

>>4124041
>tfw people misuse the quote feature and don't know how to sage

>mfw postmodernist sophistry thoroughly refuted itt

Every great civilization saw skepticism as the primary philosophical movement during its decadent phase. the postmodernists are modem stoics, and are contributing to the cultural decay of western civilization. It will take a Caesar to save our souls from the nihilism and chaos

There are different senses of post-modernism. Generally it is suspicious of metanarratives, anti-essentialist, and anti-foundationalist.

Post-modernism is the notion that there are no truths and no reality and that evolution stops at the neck, biology something you choose, that all history is class-based and started at end of the 19th century, post-modernism is the notion that everything is politics filtered through the television and the narrative of fools, and post-modernism is the belief that having psychotic illnesses somehow puts you closer in touch with the human condition, that the unsound body somehow create sound ideas, that love is death and that humans always have felt this way.

[spoilers]Seriously, fuck PoMo[/spoiler]

>>4124149
>the postmodernists are modem stoics

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

>>4124149
I piss in the face of your bourgeois pessimism.

>>4124149
wow i should really read more on mesopotamian skepticism

>>4123899
it did, just about academia, not posmodernism

>>4123892
>We are simulating verbal debate
We are not simulating anything. We are debating informally (conversationally). The fact that informal communication happens in oral communication doesn't mean that when it happens outside it, it's a simulation (informal, conversational communication also happens in letters and in emails, it happened way before computers)

>>4123892
>Images being privileged over material is another
I don't even know what you mean with this. You mean images over text?

>>4123892
>I'm by no means an expert on Postmodernism. Everything I "know" I learned from a semester long course in high school 2 years ago.
That's actually pretty pomo

>>4123535
2+2= fish

>>4123565
Fgm isn't "in Islam", it is a practice that people in Africa did before Islam, and continued to do after they converted.
Fuck you.

Let's hope so. Or it will eat itself....e v e n t u a l l y. . .

it seems like a nihilist epistemology where every culture and practice and belief is equally valid just because a group of people thought it up. How can this counter false consciousness? How is the belief that hard work for your master is a legitimate thing when it is stemmed from lies used to exploit you? This is deeply conservative - so no wonder it is popular in academia.

ITT: Euphoric teenagers and one or two people who've made an effort to get to grips with postmodernism. Everybody here who hasn't read some serious postmodernist works should read this and come back: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#2

It's perhaps better to think of postmodernism as an alternate method of inquiry, one which seeks not to exclude premises and assumptions, and in doing so necessarily rejects and destabilizes grand narratives/conceptual structures. Far-left academia like the OP post isn't really 'postmodern', but is rather an alternate conceptual structure of the kind postmodernism rejects. Literary postmodernism is different from philosophical postmodernism (just as architectural postmodernism, say, is similar but different), and can generally be considered a late 20th-century movement in which ideas of 'the work' as something apart from 'the text' are replaced with an emphasis on the limited and textual nature of literature. This isn't necessarily negative - I personally think that postmodern works, by not denying their textual nature, can achieve things that modernist works can't.

Why do people try to understand postmodernism without first investigating modernity? Both areas have historical, literary and philosophical components that are easy to cross over (because they are related, not the same). The old joke that postmodernism is defined as the period that comes after modernism has some precedent. Around what, the 1950's, postwar disillusionment, emergent technologies and industry see the basic building blocks of postmodernism; eg rejection of specifically metanarratives (not as some might put it, rejecting everything or all truth claims) and the collapse of time and space, for instance, technologically, via the internet and improved transport, sociologically through globalisation, philosophically through ahistoricity (in opposition to Hegel which is appropriate because he was central to strands of thought in modernity)

Fuck, I would recommend probably reading Peirce, James and Dewey on Pragmatism before starting to froth over 'relativistic' truth claims. Hell plenty of postmodernism, like dada, is nihilistic and without normativity or epistemology. Something like the Prince and the Magician

For example, I'm rereading if on a Winter's Night a Traveler

When did this really start?
Only like 10 to 15 years ago right?

I think Postmodernism is at its height right now. It's fresh and new but in 20 to 30 years time it won't be any more relevant than e.g. Anarcho-Syndicalism today.

I don't see this stuff going anywhere.

>>4124848
Hey anarchosyndicalism is due for a comeback

>>4124781
So "euphoric" is getting a whole new definition of its own. Interesting.

I always loved this conversation.


Hyppolite: They [i.e. the natural sciences] are like an image of the problems which we, in turn, put to ourselves. With Einstein, for example, we see the end of a kind of privilege of empiric evidence. And in that connection we see a constant appear, a constant which is a combination of space-time, which does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the experience, but which, in a way, dominates the whole construct, and this constant -- is this the center? But natural science has gone much further. It no longer searches for the constant. It considers that there are events, somehow improbable, which bring about for a while a structure and an invariability...

Derrida: Concerning the first part of your question, the Einsteinian constant is not a constant, not a center. It is the very concept of variablility -- it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something -- of a center from which an observer could master the field -- but the very concept of the game which, after all, I was trying to elaborate.

H: It is a constant in the game?

D: It is the constant of the game...

H: It is a rule of the game

D: It is a rule of the game that does not govern the game; it is a rule of the game which does not dominate the game. Now when the rule of the game is displaced by the game itself, we must find something other than the word rule.


The Eistenian constant doesn't exist. This is bullshit at its best.

>>4124781
>It's perhaps better to think of postmodernism as an alternate method of inquiry, one which seeks not to exclude premises and assumptions, and in doing so necessarily rejects and destabilizes grand narratives/conceptual structures

But... that is what always happened in science.
How is this new?

Or do we speak of assumptions and premises that are absolutely unconnected to prior knowledge? In which case I'd say it is an absolutely inefficient and unnecessary way of thinking. It's like fishing in muddy waters. Every system, be it morality, society, technology, science or other areas have produced certain prior knowledge making such a "new way of inquiry" nothing but unnatural or - to call a spade a spade - ignorant.
Anyone who thinks this isn't the case is invited to jump of the 10th floor and see what prior knowledge gravity has already prepared for them.

>>4124880
What fucking rubbish.

>>4124887
>How is this new?

It's new because what they take it to mean is completely different.

They take it to mean that exactly everything is unfounded and not worth believing - except, of course, whatever they themselves write. And since they don't say it's false, or engage with it rationally at all, but only say something like "it's a narrative no better than any other", they build giant walls of nonsense against any attempt to rebuttal or argument.

>>4123565

Heidegger is a postmodernist now?

Right.

Goodbye /lit/. It's been fun visiting you this morning.

>>4124149

>retarded historicism

I can't even begin with this one.

>>4124781

>grand narratives

Postmodernism is guilty of reification then. There may be summary narratives in various attempts to describe history, but reifying and 'rejecting' some 'grand narrative' sounds quite schizophrenic to me. This makes me think that Pomo is largely an evolution from Marxism. Only Marxists would share this jargon (and think it means anything).

>>4124920
see you in an hour.

>>4124958
Marxists hate postmodernism. At least the ones i know.

>>4124966
I imagine they would. I'm beginning to think that Pomo would be better described as post-Marxism.

>>4124969
I don't see the relation. Unless by marxist you mean gramsci and the frankfurt school instead of marx.

>>4124973
'grand narrative' is a Marxist term. The relation is in the jargon and the historicism, etc.

>>4124976
>'grand narrative' is a Marxist term
[citation needed]
It's a pomo term as far as i know.

>The relation is in the jargon and the historicism, etc.
There's no much jargon in common, unless you mean pomo marxists of course.

Gentleman, it has come to this:

Postmodernity. "Culture" assessment "survey". Cultural "studies". LGBT "clubs". Black History "Month". Feminism. "Multi"culturalism. "Diversity."

I tell you, Ladies and Gentleman--the one place you will truly NOT find diversity is the Literature department of a university today. The above Buzzwords are merely synonyms for acute Cultural Marixsm that has infected Proper study within universities as a whole and literature especially. The powers that be have the audacity to call Conrad racist or Dostoevsky antisemitic. Horrifying. Truly Horrifying. Prose cannot merely be enjoyed--it must undergo psychoanalysis--a truly virulent strain of Marxism. The very thought of Post-modern Marxist professors Squeeing with joy at the falsely implied homosexual undertones of men draining a large black whale of semen is enough to make one Nauseated. I Weep, as always--for the future of Proper Literature and for those of us who attempt to pass the torch of Literacy.

>>4123581
>If they both work then yes they are as valid as each other. The important factor is that they both fulfill a societal role as a 'medicine' regardless of how the culture has constructed that idea.

Except that argument doesn't allow for varying degrees of validity. Some medicines are objectively more effective at treating a given disease than others.

>>4125002
This kind of crazy rants only harm the critique of postmodernism. Or maybe you are joking, i can't tell anymore.

>>4125011

A Man of Proper Literature does not Jest when he sees his world crumbling around him.

Post-modernity is a Vile Pestilence: A text can mean just abount "anything" depending on how one "argues". As any disenchanted student will tell you, the closer their "anything" is to the professor's kind of "anything" the higher their grade is. I'm surprised these crooks with degrees even bother to continue the sham of "grades" and don't simply award students with Tolerance Points or Degrees of Irony.

>>4124149
Spengler as fuck. Mah nigga

>Two things
>First thing
Philosophic PoMo is about narratives. Humans turn facts into stories, stories into bigger stories...N... Until cultural/religious "Super Stories" get created, that fold so many of the lesser stories into themselves that they become the epistemic basis for finding new facts and organizing those facts into stories. All "Super Stories" reflect human experience, but arbitrarily to a certain unavoidable degree. PreMo attempted to eliminate this arbitrariness with god and empiricism and all the other basis for ABSOLUTE TRUTH we have ever used. PoMo discards this belief that arbitrariness can be eliminated, but does not shake the old prejudice that only perfectly non arbitrary "Super Stories" matter.

>>4124897
Grow up.

>>4125055
Grow up.

>>4125069
Grow up.

>>4125069
OK.

>>4125072
Grow up.

>>4125080
OK!

This thread is an unbelievable circlejerk. Reading it made me remember why I stopped visiting /lit/.

>>4125093

I'm glad you've found a way to feel superior.

>>4124149
Fuck Caesar man, only another God can save us

>>4125136
Don't mouse-over this spoiler if you're not ready for the truth.
Tao Lin can save us.

>>4124848
Post Modernism is older than most people think. I can't quite remember (and wikipedia and google is cheating), but I think it goes as for back as the late 50's. One of the key works of the postmodernist movement in literature. 'The Crying of Lot 49' was first published in 1966. But I do think that it's only been the last twenty years where everything has gone to shit, but it's mostly the masses fault, since they have enrolled in universities even though they don't have any talent for theory and critical thinking. If they weren't enrolled in universities, they would be thruthers, believing in lizardmen or any of that new age crap. Instead, they buy in to the intellectual equivalents: Afrocentrism, Queertheory and so on.

>>4123420
>rebuild anew

You missed that train a long time ago. Now there's a new masturbatory paradigm, except instead of enshrining human industry while leaving human suffering as an afterthought, it's now the inverse.

>>4124659
Much like most of Leviticus in Christianity, it's been selectively disowned by many Islamic institutions while others have continued to embrace it as a religious practice.

>>4125147
Postmodernism has always existed, it was just realized in the 50s.

>>4124149
>Ciceronian scepticism
>not the highest philosophical flowering of a civilization, which was then followed by decadence and tyranny

You're doing it wrong

>>4123411

That pic text is not real, right? That did not happen?

i plan to republish old literature. I will put quotation marks at the begging and end of each work and add "hahaha" at the end of each text. Is this postmodern?

>>4123411
what is this a thread from 25 years ago?

>>4125278
You do realize that the very word contradicts your statement, right?

>>4125002
>>4125018
Hello bloomkid.

>>4125320
It did. Postmodernists then argued that the two versions of history were as valid.