Post-modernism

[Worm of Despite]

Post-modernism, basically, extrapolates that there is no center to anything (in terms of culture and in a broader scope the universe). Modernism, its early 20th century predecessor, spoke that there was a center: art (T.S. Eliot's Wasteland poem bemoans the loss of culture).

Anyway, here's my view on post-modernism, as it's still pretty much our current movement: it's bullshit. I wrote a very post-modern book and I think it's BS (not the book, just post-modernism). Why? Our universe may look chaotic but it is bound by very firm laws of science. The next movement will be informed by this science--that there is an order, even in entropic decay, and we can make our own order adhere to that (i.e., survive) for as long as we can.

I think it's time we stepped away from saying everything is dissonance and fucked up and admit that there is order (the very order that allows me to be an organism and type across this keyboard). I think all our movements (Romanticism/Paganism, Enlightenment) are circling back to the basic awareness of what's around us, and again, even if we lose the battle of existence and every star dies, it happened according to laws--to a center. Even the worst facets of existence (murder and chaos) revolve to it.

Anyway; your thoughts. Perhaps we can fine-tune this philosophy and give it a name. My second book pretty much espouses this nameless movement.

[danlo]

I stole this comment from the Survive 2012 site. I firmly believe that the supposed 'end of the world' isn't a huge physical disaster but a mental and spiritual paradigm shift. I think that what you're calling an unknown new philosophy is the return to or 'honing' of the scared interpretations of the hidden order in everything. I didn't write this, but it espouses some core Deist views-

Best way to survive the change? Start changing the way you see and think about the world. The new life coming to this planet will not be like it is now. It will not be a big competition for who owns the most, earns the most etc. - Our western culture is very young and cannot last much longer. Why? Because we take so much from the earth and put nothing back. We do not see the world we live in as sacred. Yet we are just as sacred as anything else because God and nature and life are all the same thing! - We are a part of the same force as the wind, the sunrise, the streams, the food we eat, our thoughts feelings and dreams. Everything is natural. Everything is God. Everything is sacred. We have forgotten this but now is the time to remember! - What we do to the world we do to ourselves, and what we do to ourselves we do to the world. - If you can remember this and see the people you know, the world around you (even the bad stuff!) as sacred then you will have a better life here on earth NOW and chances are you will survive and move on up to the beautiful new level that is coming soon! - So forget the race! Forget the past! Forgive yourself and everyone around you and see the perfection in all things! Watch from a distance and smile! Get really involved and still smile! Feel the glow in your heart! - SEE AND FEEL THE MAGIC!! NOW IS THE TIME!! YOU ARE SAFE -BE HAPPY!!

Hopefully Dec. 2012 is when the Quantum and the Spiritual meet...

[Loredoctor]

That is not a bad definition of something that defies definition, Lord Foul. And I absolutely agree that Post-Modernism is rubbish. I have no respect for post-modernist thought in art or philosphy.

However, that being said you have to be careful about order. The universe is ordered on the macro scale - and on the micro (quantum) world the universe appears chaotic. However, certain schools of though argue otherwise - treating it less like chaos and more like probability (which is more accurate - see Bohmian theory).

[Lord Mhoram]

Postmodernism is mostly bullshit, I agree. My current English class is mostly a literary theory class, which means it's basically a seminar on postmodern critical methodology -- and it totally sucks. I need to read novels and stories through the lens of a particular postmodern school -- feminism (academic feminism, not the elementary notion that women should be held as equals to men), postcolonialism, deconstruction, cultural studies (the term alone is vacuous) -- in order to get a good grade. I wrote a perfectly good paper on a Hawthorne novel, and got a B+ because it was mostly aestheticist in style and approach.

I think most postmodern thinkers have very low academic and intellectual standards. The classic example of this is the so-called Sokal affair. A physicist with a PhD from Princeton wrote a paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" about the socially constructed nature of quantum mechanics to a Duke University postmodern journal, and filled it with utter garbage. It was a fake paper. And they published it, and he exposed them for their fraudulence.

That said I think there are a few postmodern pioneers who were quite brilliant. Michel Foucault, for example, was a fascinating thinker who made, in my opinion, genuine intellectual advances in Western thought. He was the late-20th century's leading European thinker despite the fact that he was a postmodernist. Jacques Derrida was mostly a trickster, but he was a clever one even though the intellectual school he inspired (deconstruction) I have come to see as mostly bankrupt. Edward Said is mostly the same story, although he borrowed a lot from Foucault (not necessarily a bad thing). But most of them are frauds, in my opinion (Lacan, Nancy, Zizek, et al.).

Postmodern lit is not appealing to me aesthetically, but I have a great deal of respect for it.

[Loredoctor]

Michel Foucault's influence on Psychology cannot be underestimated. The analysis of discourse - the deconstruction of the language of therapy reinvented therapy for some (including me, although I am not a therapist). Foucault is one Post-modernist I respect, although I would not label him as such; he's more of a contextualist (is that correct, LM?).

[Lord Mhoram]

He was certainly a contextualist and you are right about his accomplishments. I would still label him as a postmodernist but one who is still different from the rest. For one he engaged in actual philosophy of science, while most postmodernists just poo-poo it away. He was a practitioner of philosophy while most postmodernists are metaphilosophers who talk about philosophy (and literature) rather than practice it. In my opinion anyway, and I realize I'm generalizing a lot. But the deconstructive methods Foucault used, his emphasis on the history of philosophy, and his post-structuralism make him a postmodernist in my opinion. Just a good one.

[Loredoctor]

He was certainly a contextualist and you are right about his accomplishments. I would still label him as a postmodernist but one who is still different from the rest. For one he engaged in actual philosophy of science while most postmodernists just poo-poo it away. He was a practitioner of philosophy while most postmodernists are metaphilosophers who talk about philosophy (and literature) rather than practice it. In my opinion anyway, and I realize I'm generalizing a lot. But the deconstructive methods Foucault used, his emphasis on the history of philosophy, and his post-structuralism make him a postmodernist in my opinion. Just a good one.

You're absolutely correct. Even if the field of post-modernism is nonsense, there are gems in the dirt, so to speak. I should not hesitate to label Foucault as a PM.

[Worm of Despite]

I'd love to add stuff, but you guys are pretty much covering everything except one comment: those who espoused post-modernism in the past (I keep using espouse a lot tonight) were in an era when, depending on the decade, that's all they had. I think now we're coming on the cusp of a new thought process; basically hindsight.

I also think it ironic that Post-modernism and Modernism questioned the movements of the past and now we're questioning them.

Come to think of it, only one work in my book is post-modern, but even there I subvert it by making the person who believes in post-modernism actually a brutal murderer, and then in the next story I completely negate its heralding of entropy and chaotic simplicity with a single paragraph:

You expect to lose everything from the war. You expect it will make you strong. You fancy yourself in some new image: a monk, perhaps, who out of the swath of destruction becomes reborn, awoken from the complications of modernity. You think you will become harder. You will become leaner, perhaps. You will shed tears and sweat like any man. But I tell you now; you certainly will lose everything from the war, but it will not be the gentleman’s release, the smoothly combed dapper hair. You will not gain simplicity or spontaneity. You will rub past the dust and find the complexities you so strove to hide from.

And that story is supremely concerned with man's need for order and the goodness that the group system is, despite the codifications of objectivity and personal morality we use to extricate ourselves or hold ourselves above it. In reality we are in desperate need, always, of order, and our beliefs--all movements--are but playthings if we find ourselves outside society. Put a man in an asylum. That man will willingly, and sincerely, become a Christian if he is an atheist, just to get out. All one needs is enough time and isolation. People suddenly become aware of the unspoken social contract once the social universe is jerked from under them. All else fades, and you will change completely if you have to get back in it.

To make a long story short: Post-modernism is a luxury, like jogging or exercise in developed countries. It is a trinket, fascinating, but I find reality is much more complicated and scientific and yes, ordered.

[Loredoctor]

I think post-modernism questions itself

[Worm of Despite]

It should. It really should.

[rusmeister]

I'd love to add stuff, but you guys are pretty much covering everything except one comment: those who espoused post-modernism in the past (I keep using espouse a lot tonight) were in an era when, depending on the decade, that's all they had. I think now we're coming on the cusp of a new thought process; basically hindsight.

There has always been hindsight - every age readily sees the errors of previous ages and is blind to its own. The only way out is to constantly travel to other ages and be struck by the things that they see that we don't. Until you invent a time machine, the future is out. But the past is accessible to us. When you do go back often enough and to a sufficient variety of places and times, you can see that they had hindsight, too. One of the greatest errors is to pride ourselves on thinking that we know better than they did; that our ideas are really new ideas.

ON READING

The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is
apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration.
The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from
being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself
to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly
money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned.
The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns.
Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work
in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing
other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment
be prone. The way in which it does this, however, is sufficiently
curious to be worth our fully understanding it to begin with.

From time to time in human history, but especially in restless
epochs like our own, a certain class of things appears.
In the old world they were called heresies. In the modern world
they are called fads. Sometimes they are for a time useful;
sometimes they are wholly mischievous. But they always consist
of undue concentration upon some one truth or half-truth. Thus it
is true to insist upon God's knowledge, but heretical to insist on it
as Calvin did at the expense of his Love; thus it is true to desire
a simple life, but heretical to desire it at the expense of good
feeling and good manners. The heretic (who is also the fanatic)
is not a man who loves truth too much; no man can love truth too much.
The heretic is a man who loves his truth more than truth itself.
He prefers the half-truth that he has found to the whole truth
which humanity has found. He does not like to see his own precious
little paradox merely bound up with twenty truisms into the bundle
of the wisdom of the world.

Sometimes such innovators are of a sombre sincerity like Tolstoi,
sometimes of a sensitive and feminine eloquence like Nietzsche,
and sometimes of an admirable humour, pluck, and public spirit like
Mr. Bernard Shaw. In all cases they make a stir, and perhaps found
a school. But in all cases the same fundamental mistake is made.
It is always supposed that the man in question has discovered a new idea.
But, as a fact, what is new is not the idea, but only the isolation
of the idea. The idea itself can be found, in all probability,
scattered frequently enough through all the great books of a more
classic or impartial temper, from Homer and Virgil to Fielding
and Dickens. You can find all the new ideas in the old books;
only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place,
and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas.
The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought
of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers
to it as well.

In case this point is not clear, I will take two examples,
both in reference to notions fashionable among some of the more
fanciful and younger theorists. Nietzsche, as every one knows,
preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as
very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been
the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior
types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree
with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea.
It is calmly and persistently supposed that the great writers of the past,
say Shakespeare for instance, did not hold this view, because they
had never imagined it; because it had never come into their heads.
Turn up the last act of Shakespeare's Richard III and you will
find not only all that Nietzsche had to say put into two lines,
but you will find it put in the very words of Nietzsche.
Richard Crookback says to his nobles:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

As I have said, the fact is plain. Shakespeare had thought of Nietzsche
and the Master Morality; but he weighed it at its proper value
and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a
half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat. This rage against the weak
is only possible in a man morbidly brave but fundamentally sick;
a man like Richard, a man like Nietzsche. This case alone ought
to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophies are modern
in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them.
They thought of them; only they did not think much of them.
It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea;
he saw it, and he saw through it.

I will take one other example: Mr. Bernard Shaw in his striking
and sincere play called "Major Barbara", throws down one of
the most violent of his verbal challenges to proverbial morality.
People say, "Poverty is no crime." "Yes," says Mr. Bernard Shaw,
"poverty is a crime, and the mother of crimes. It is a crime
to be poor if you could possibly rebel or grow rich.
To be poor means to be poor-spirited, servile or tricky."
Mr. Shaw shows signs of an intention to concentrate on
this doctrine, and many of his followers do the same.
Now, it is only the concentration that is new, not the doctrine.
Thackeray makes Becky Sharp say that it is easy to be moral
on £1,000 a year, and so difficult on £100. But, as in the case
of Shakespeare I have quoted, the point is not merely that Thackeray
knew of this conception, but that he knew exactly what it was worth.
It not only occurred to him, but he knew where it ought to occur.
It ought to occur in the conversation of Becky Sharp; a woman
shrewd and not without sincerity, but profoundly unacquainted
with all the deeper emotions which make life worth living.
The cynicism of Becky, with Lady Jane and Dobbin to balance it,
has a certain breezy truth. The cynicism of Mr. Shaw's Undershaft,
preached alone with the austerity of a field preacher, is simply not
true at all. It is simply not true at all to say that the very poor
are as a whole more insincere or more grovelling than the very rich.
Becky's half-truth has become first a crotchet, then a creed,
and then a lie. In the case of Thackeray, as in that of Shakespeare,
the conclusion which concerns us is the same. What we call
the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas.
It was not that a particular notion did not enter Shakespeare's head;
it is that it found a good many other notions waiting to knock
the nonsense out of it.

www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Common_Man.txt

[Worm of Despite]

I'd love to add stuff, but you guys are pretty much covering everything except one comment: those who espoused post-modernism in the past (I keep using espouse a lot tonight) were in an era when, depending on the decade, that's all they had. I think now we're coming on the cusp of a new thought process; basically hindsight.

There has always been hindsight - every age readily sees the errors of previous ages and is blind to its own. The only way out is to constantly travel to other ages and be struck by the things that they see that we don't. Until you invent a time machine, the future is out. But the past is accessible to us. When you do go back often enough and to a sufficient variety of places and times, you can see that they had hindsight, too. One of the greatest errors is to pride ourselves on thinking that we know better than they did; that our ideas are really new ideas.

'German pagans. Romantics. Perhaps my children. There are not that many divisions in this world--only old ideas coming back into fashion.’

[danlo]

Reminds me, actually this whole thread does, of a Stephen King story title: Everything's Eventual...

Eventualism? AHHH, maybe not...

[Worm of Despite]

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.

I would go with Structuralism, myself, underlying the structure that does define even the process of our own decay. Though! Structuralism has been used I believe. But for years man has doubted himself and his gamut of beliefs, simply because of the horrors of war, and I think that's beside the point. The only thing our doubting shows is that we are feeling, spiritual, social beings; we strive to do the right thing and I think it's time we return to a faith in structure and beauty inherent in humanity and existence. I believe perfection does exist. A drop of milk fell from my glass the other day and I notice how perfectly its shape was splayed on the table for one moment. Whether something is symmetrical, eye-pleasing design or asymmetry, it is underlined with an irrefutable order, and the chaos that does come out at even the micro level (as Lore said) is conjoined to this.

[danlo]

our own decay

We'd make great compost...

[Avatar]

I'm not oposed to post-modernism per se really. Now maybe academic post-modernism is a bit overdone (or not done correctly), but really what is it but the belief in completely open interpretation?

Science and order are all very well, but the opposite of post-modernism is absolutism, and I'm not a great believer in absolutes...so maybe it depends where you're applying it.

(And of course it questions itself...or should. It's supposed to question everything. )

--A

[Prebe]

...and got a B+

[Worm of Despite]

I'm not oposed to post-modernism per se really. Now maybe academic post-modernism is a bit overdone (or not done correctly), but really what is it but the belief in completely open interpretation?

Science and order are all very well, but the opposite of post-modernism is absolutism, and I'm not a great believer in absolutes...so maybe it depends where you're applying it.

Well, it's not about opposites; 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.

Aesthetically I find it interesting, sometimes. It's better than what came before, to some extent, but I find lots of truths in previous movements, such as Romanticism saying man can become his own Church. I also believe that until we find anything in the universe that we can share our hearts and thoughts with, then we are the only thing of value within it. Sentient life took billions of years to get here--to make hearts the size of our fists that hold us up--and the fact that all creatures fight to stay aware says how precious it is. I think Post-modernism overshoots this awe and gets lost in the details.

[Lord Mhoram]

Ehhh. I'd take a great Modernist novel over a great postmodernist novel any day.

[aliantha]

our own decay

We'd make great compost...

And in time, we will.