Post-modernism

[rusmeister]

Hopefully movement names will be eschewed. I think we've been in the post-post-Modern age for awhile, but no one's willing to offer a name. It's a long, uncertain white noise after the Post-modern, a branch lilting out into space and no one identifying it or even its characteristics. Or maybe we're transitioning. In any case, science is now irrevocably and will be increasingly intertwined with aesthetics.

What you're describing is usually called "the Spirit of the Age" or "Zeitgeist". This has people uncovering a truth about life, and doing what GKC described in the quote I posted above. Any comments on his words?

[Avatar]

...it's about clarifying Post-modernism's insistence that everything is chaotic or undefined, when there are truths out there. Philosophically we can become so winded up that we can agree on nothing else but our existence, and even that will become debatable. Scientifically there is an order to things...

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "truth."

--A

[Kinslaughterer]

Post-modernism on the whole probably isn't that useful but when specifically applied to certain arenas has been surprisingly informative. Deconstructing some forms of thought has really exposed the biases and assumptions underlying many theories and methods.

I'd say you can toss out post-modernism and just keep Deconstruction. Its the folks in between the two that seem the most interesting like Ian Hodder in archaeology for instance...he's excavating at Catal Hoyuk in modern Turkey.

[Vraith]

I'm getting the feeling that several of you are, to some extent, assigning the problems of bad scholarship [nearly as common as bad novels...] to the central tenets [there's an oxymoron] of post-modernism.
Start with an easy one: there is no center. Well, in fact there isn't in any provable/absolute sense.
Someone said it claims all is chaos: no, it doesn't. It claims undecidability, a completely different statement. This also relates to truth. This is an area that could be argued about forever due to the complications, and territory it covers, but an important part is that any knowledge you claim, by definition, precludes other options/possibilities. Example: Geometry. Most think it's all one field. Others know there are multiple kinds of geometry. If you use Euclidean, you can design a pretty safe building (but only because the variations are so small between the ideal and the fact of the planet's shape and other factors.) If you try to go to Mars using it, you are dead. Now, mathematics is probably the most perfectly defined area of human knowledge. People say the Universe follows mathematical laws. Horsepucky. Math, like every other kind of knowledge, depends on using the right math for the right situation. The Universe doesn't follow math, math describes the Universe, but only piece by piece, not as a whole. You can talk about the Sun mathematically, or in poetry. One may have more value practically than the other...but is not more TRUE. And it's not that one person couldn't both write a great poem and mathematical description of the sun...they just can't do both at the same time...one hides the other. If one is capable in both, one can inform the other in meaningful ways, [which leads to multiplicity, not singularity] but in many instances, one kind can absolutely contradict necessary facts of the other. [though not in the sun example, that I'm aware of.] I'll stop now before I get really dull, except to say the Universe is post-modern..it refuses to be boxed, and nothing is true in itself, only in context, and if it IS true without context, it is meaningless to us. [oh..and post-modernism depends on criticism of itself, which may be why it hasn't been utterly supplanted] {oh, and it also aknowledges that valuable things can be learned utilizing other viewpoints...they just aren't Truth}