Postmodernism

Each work is a product of human thought, which is shaped by the society around it. So it isn't unreasonable to assume that societal bias isn't reflected unconsciously or consciously critiqued or affirmed in every work of fiction ever created.

Example: in the Iliad conflict is largely instigated by women (Eris, three goddesses squabbling, Helen existing as a status symbol). This could be read into.

What you're talking about here is totally within the domain of modernism.

Post-modernism begins when an arbitrary secondary consideration like this BECOMES the story itself. Along with any other countless number of inter-conflicting silly readings. All are equally legitimate with the spirit of the text itself thrown away. Unspeakable

post-modernism means being meta and extremely self-aware is the pinnacle of thought. There is nothing beyond meta, you can only add multiple layers of meta.

We must return to naturalism.

This must be a mischcaracterization, no serious academic would be that stupid.

Everything is not subjective. Everything is self-referential.

>no serious academic would be that stupid.

Why the fuck would you EVER assume that?

HINT HINT, they don't actually believe it to be true but its expedient for their politics and career to pretend as if it is

Modernism and modernity, conventionally beginning with the Enlightenment and its Early Modern precursors, were dominated by what post-modernism calls "meta-narratives." Meta-narrative is a useful term for describing, more or less, any grand explanation of what the hell is going on with humanity (or with core aspects of humanity), and what we're supposed to do about it.

These meta-narratives were often totalizing and eschatological. That is, they often approached humanity, its history and its destiny, in terms of explicit or implicit moral programs. Some of the most obvious and common examples are the obsession with scientism, with technology, with enlightenment and rationality, with "progress." Marxism was eschatological, it had a Hegelian philosophy of history that concluded in utopia. Social darwinism and its offshoots had all kinds of meta-narratives about the survival of the fittest, or pushing human development forward. Theories of art, science, religion, philosophy, human consciousness, were all more or less imbued with these themes.

This is all very "modern" and it's what post-modernism is responding to. Critiques of modernity and many of these meta-narratives started to appear already in the 19th century, from all quarters, as society industrialized and urbanized, and as people became suspicious about the naive optimism and single-mindedness of many of the narratives. With the crises and world wars of the 20th century, "cultural pessimism" became more and more tha norm among intellectuals, along with a general sense that all the enlightenment and optimism had actually ended up creating a modernity that was more of a prison than a utopia.

After WW2 and its trauma, when the "what was all that killing and technologized death, with its 'enlightened' scientificity and organisation, even FOR?" sentiment was reaching its highest point, the colonial empires then fell apart under decolonisation, and no one could even have faith in the meta-narrative of their shattered nation's glory and manifest destiny anymore. Lots and lots of social theory started to proliferate that emphasised pluralism and deeply critiqued EVERYTHING the old world had arrogantly taken for granted. The whole general theme of meta-narrativising, and naively running full speed ahead into tragedy, was seen as a MODERN thing, a historical accident born from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, etc.

Postmodernism is basically about saying "If that's what modernity was all about, if modernity was about confidently asserting that your interpretation of reality is correct, and then gung-ho shoving it down African and Asian throats, or slaughtering millions of people based on it, or re-building society to be an industrial hell, or destroying meaning and religion and joy so you can have a perfectly 'scientific' world with no room for humanity left in it, then fuck modernity."

>Can someone explain to me what postmodernism is?
>a clear, concise definition

>implying sign=signifier

Stop imposing your discourse and power structure on me you fascist.

The tension of postmodernism, what annoys people about it, comes from the fact that it inherits all the thought of modernity, it builds on the ruins of modernity and with the ruined fragments of modernity. In a sense, we are only able to see why relativism and pluralism are the only valid positions BECAUSE this is itself a totalising, non-relativising moral position - the position of "total" relativism - which is itself an Enlightenment way of thinking. There is a constant tension between this moral "never again!" aversion to any naively optimistic meta-narrative and the realisation that this aversion is, in itself, a meta-narrative, and that it's not a very satisfying one because we're still living in a wasted neo-liberal post-capitalist hell anyway.

Postmodernists handle this paradox in various ways and it often seems like they're being deliberately slippery, but that's because they associate rigidity and certitude with Very Bad Things, because modernity was typified people who were very certain and rigid in their moral commitment to gassing millions of people or to turning humans into commodity-purchasing automata.

This explanation is very good, although it should include more about how its the Jews behind it all instead of just hinting at it

by definition your definition is as good as anyone's

Can someone corroborate that these are somewhat accurate definitions, because they seem really well articulated

I don't want to take what was said here for granted though

Nah he's pretty on the ball

>Westerners genocide an entire continent's population by 90%+ and replace it with Western settlements
>Westerners enslave Africans for generations
>Westerners educate Asians to massacre each other in the tens of millions for Western ideologies
>Westerners stand by and watch as the Armenians are genocided
>Westerners kill about five million Je--

WHOA, WHOA, WHOA! WAIT A MINUTE! HISTORY IS OVER! HISTORY HAS COME TO AN END! THERE CAN BE NO POETRY AFTER THIS! THERE CAN BE NO LIFE! WE ARE IN THE MAUSOLEUM OF THE HUMAN CONDITION NOW! HOW DARE YOU TOUCH A JEW? A SACRED JEW, ONE OF THE CHOSEN RACE, THE GLORIOUS CHOSEN PEOPLE WHOSE FEET YOU WILL BE KISSING FOR ALL TIME ONCE THE MESSIAH COMES? HOW DARE YOU KILL FIVE MILLION JEWS, EACH OF WHICH IS WORTH A BILLION GENTILES, YOU SLAVE-RACE OF NON-CHOSEN CATTLE WHO WILL LICK OUR CIRCUMCISED COCKS IN G-D'S PERFECT WORLD?? HOW DARE YOU THINK HISTORY CAN CONTINUE AFTER THIS TRAVESTY? NOW EXCUSE ME, I HAVE SOME PALESTINIANS TO HOLOCAUST!

Yep, that’s basically the case.

I like this pasta.

>post-capitalist
Did you mean post-industrial?

you are very unwelcome here

These posts show me there's still hope for this board

>

But his copypasta is very correct.

>five million

Heh

I don't know about your country, but in mine we don't really give a shit about jews. You have to take the jew thing with a grain of salt and remember that the USA citizens are, overall, a borderline paranoid population in many senses.

First post is better than the second. You did a good job capturing what lead to postmodern thought, included a lot of examples, did your best to remain objective. What could be improved, what I took for your weakest part, is the turn to postmodernism. I don't think is was so simple as "then fuck modernism." You could also include some knowledge about postmodernism itself and how it actually works, makes claims to knowledge, explains language or history.

Your work is mainly summery told in a story structure. I can picture it being read over a black and white video of a plane dropping the a bomb, or scientist running experiments. I imagine you heard it from some such source. It reminds me of the Partially Examined life's video on Peterson, where he spends the first few minutes explaining postmodernism and how it came about.

Work that does not go beyond summary always gets a C. Good job user.

What the fuck

t. hasn't read Faulkner

>we don't really give a shit about jews
It's more pointing out how foolish and ahistorical it is to single out the 20th century as a particularly brutal time. You have to be very ignorant, or have an ideological axe to grind, to think that modernity led to unparalleled suffering.

It isn't inconsistent, but b=a doesn't mean a=b.

This video has the best explanation of it that I have ever seen. He doesn't get to it right away, but the whole thing is very much worth a watch.

youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c

And no, I didn't link the wrong video by mistake.

Faulkner was a direct precurser to post modernist

Modernism: There is a universal truth. People have a tendency to look for truth. People go crazy because they aren't mature enough to see the truth.

Post modernism: There is no universal truth. People have a tendency to look for truth. People go crazy because they can't find something that doesn't exist.

>It isn't inconsistent, but b=a doesn't mean a=b.

Yes it does..

Meth is a drug, but not all drugs are meth.

Hahaha holy fuck imagine the mental hoops this motherfucker had to jump through to believe this

>I don't know about your country, but in mine we don't really give a shit about jews
If it is a western country then you do (a la Hate Speech and Holocaust Denial laws). The narrative of the Holocaust as the worst crime in human history is a narrative that you cannot deny exists all over the west.
You also cannot deny that that aforementioned narrative has resulted in other genocides being pushed under the rug in terms of cultural awareness.
>the USA citizens are, overall, a borderline paranoid population in many senses
If you honestly believe this, you're the paranoid one. I think you are going to need to back up that extremely wide and outrageous statement.

Ah ok but you might want to have a quick look into Aristotelian notation if you want to get this across

You retard, that's if a then b vs if b then a, not a = b vs b = a

Pic related

I have a Jewish friend who hates himself because he's Jewish. Is he redpilled?

My bad

a = b and b = a are logically equivalent

Every S is P: S --> P
No S is P: P --> ~S

P = S: P is the same thing as S
S = P: S is the same thing as P

Almost, he has to take the Paul of Tarsus Pill
Divine captcha confirms

I see your point now, sry

The two are effectively the same.

Ask to trade him for it. Being a Jew is great, from my outsider view

Maybe he doesn't want to be a scrawny ratfaced resentful exploitative cretin

>postmodernism is an attempt to think [about] the present historically

uh huh, interesting

> in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place

This is the "Muh present people r decadent dum dums" meme

More people know how to think historically than ever. It's just that because of a variety of factors, including the Dunning-Kruger effect, widespread edutainment, political thriller and historical thriller entertainment, there's a lot more people making half-assed attempts at talking about history. Your soccer mum might say something like "I was reading the other day that English sounded nothing like it does today a long time ago. I think it's because they started letting women say more things." and you might find that trite and cringeworthy and pleb and indicative of some lack of knowledge, but it's a godsend compared with previous eras.

Your average medieval person wouldn't have been literate, let alone educated on matters of history. Neither are they gonna start quoting from "Top ten historical blijdl;kfj" articles either. Their knowledge would have been be less, along with their eagerness/ability to demonstrate their lack of knowledge.

It's like John Green said :^)
Nobody woke up at the height of Egyptian civilization and sad "Gee, it sure is nice living at the height of Egyptian civilization."

Yet, here we are on Veeky Forums, for years acknowledging the decline and corruption of American hegemony.

That full house confirms

plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
Start here and ignore the retards above me. Please notice that philosophical postmodernism and artistic/literary postmodernism are two different things.
You're a fucking retard.

Postmodernism is not as much as total subjectivity as the rejection of total authority. It doesn't say that all readings of a text are equally valid but that there's not a single reading that can explain the whole text.

Postmodernism is subjective in the sense that a text can be interpreted from different perspective, not in the sense that you can get away with saying that an apple is an orange.

It goes without saying that your average women studies professor and their students don't get postmodernism and are destroying it.

holy shit that lizard is funky

>no serious academic would be that stupid.
no serious academic would ever browse Veeky Forums either tbdesu

Thats untrue, I'm a serious academic myself

I remember one time on here, I pointed out the correlation between people spelling postmodernism with a hyphen and being morons from /pol/ and since then I have almost never seen the obvious /pol/fags spell it post-modern.
I feel like this is my great contribution to our field.

I've always been embarrassed by this board's average mathematical intelligence and understanding of statistics and probability. It's consistently painful to witness as a Veeky Forumsizen

>you're a fucking retard

I feel so bad now

nigga what

not him, but you are. certainly disorganised in thought.

You're an idiot who doesn't know shit about what you're talking about.

you dumb dass all

You're an idiot who doesn't know shit about what you're talking about.

Nothing about that post had anything to do with mathematics

Postmodernism includes a variety of writers and tendencies in philosophy.

What they have in common is an affinity for post-structuralist critique of existing (modernist) thought and concepts.

Your understanding of the possibility of a recurring hyphen had everything to do with it.

oh boy, you refuted all my points, thanks

Grow up you fucking child

>Me
>disorganized

>not the guy asserting with no evidence that people in general used to be better at understanding history, but have since gotten worse

I gave multiple counter examples, and my only two responses were "u suck" and "nice pic"

And so far you haven't asserted anything either.

Could it be that you just resent my character and bearing and don't have anything in particular to say about what I've said?

Just speculating.

Because fascists did it and they seemed to reject(and be a rejection of) everything that resembled post-modernist as degenerate and championed classical art and stuff.
Also the metanarrative countries just lead to a superdestructive war AGAIN after everybody in their right lind didn't want it to happen again

Jewish postmodernism is defined as the dissolution of order and the inversion of western cultural values and norms. The first major seeds of it were being planted in our culture early last century and have metastasized into the nihilistic and degenerate pornographic shit show we have today. Jews have been poisoning our culture for decades and postmodernism is the result.

So yeah it is a kneejerk reaction but what is post-modernism if not a kneejerk reaction?

Imagine believing this.

Jew detected.

>tfw jewish
Why do you hate me so? :^(₪

different person but I think you kinda missed their point.
Thinking historically about the present is very different from thinking about history in the present. Former means understanding the present as itself being and becoming history. This way of understanding requires a certain detached view of present ethical norms for example. Only when viewing and judging them as we would those from, again, for example, 500 years ago, we are thinking about the present historically.
The examples you gave were examples of the latter, of "thining about history in the present".

I hope that clears things up a bit.

Universal literacy was a mistake.

It’s a good post and he’s right in my opinion. Rare, quality content on Veeky Forums

No, it’s a stupid comparison. Western thought revolves around the western world, the holocaust obviously left a much larger impact than any other tragedy, as it was perpetrated on western soil, by western men.
Plus, there was no reason to deny, ignore or hush up the Holocaust, as opposed to colonialism and the Armenian genocide. Politics 101 says you shouldn’t cry about your country committing mass murder and exploitation to your compatriots as the political leadership, it’s bad for business.

It’s just another jewbait and a petty attempt at marginalizing the holocaust.

The 20th century was inarguably the most destructive period in all of human history, the deadliest period in all of human history and therefore the period of human history with the most suffering of all.

Its that pic.

>jews don't like that leader of germany claims they are subhumans that need to be purged
>boycott germany
>wtf murdering six million jews is justified now

>shits on your carpet

check this out senpai:
>postmodernism is the realization that everything has already been written.
ka-blam-o

tfw no qt jewess feet to kiss

Whoah, hold on there. Haven't you read any philosophy? Morality, is like, relative (like a "spook"), so murdering 4 million Jews (I think the word "murdering" can be debated here (if you're interested, watch The Greatest Story Never Told)) isn't objectively wrong, because it's, like, relative.

good post

I assume he hates himself because he sees some of the stereotypical negative Jewish character traits within himself.

We all have our own natural inclinations, but we are not wholly subservient to them -- our upbringing and education teaches us valuable lessons that guide the future development of our character, and illuminate how to best satiate our inner-most desires.

How could someone who lacks the will to amend their situation, and resigns to despairing over their base instincts ever be considered 'redpilled'?

Totally wrong. Check out infant mortality rates, death from diseases, famines etc. You were less likely to die young in the 20th century then any preceding period.

>getting triggered by pasta

Good effort mate, but I feel it's not sufficient to describe it as a movement against the certainty with which modernity postulated its various 'meta-narratives'. I think you're making it sound too benign and descriptive, but I to me it's clear that its reach extends beyond that. Now, to be fair, you have acknowledged that by taking this stance, postmodernism ends up positing a meta-narrative of its own.

Postmodernism doesn't merely declare itself an open-minded agnostic or a sceptic of historical progress, epistemic certainty, identity, ethical hierarchies, etc. It speaks with certainty, although not necessarily explicitly, as though these are epistemological objects that are forever beyond our reach. I will grant you that its conclusions vary and won't throw all postmodernists in the post-structuralist pit, but one thing they have in common is an ethos so divorced from pragmatism and responsibility for their relativist descriptions that I see their descriptive intentions as having direr effects than the modernist meta-narrative that they set out to fight against. Time will tell.