This is a serious request

This is a serious request

Can someone please explain why postmodernism is bad?

And by postmodernism, do you also mean postmodernist literature?

memes

"new" ideas upset preexisting structure, which alienates us from the past, our most direct link to which being our parents. antipoms are obsessed with fucking their moms while their dad looks on approvingly, so they have to fully reject pomo if they have any hope of fulfilling their greatest subconscious fantasy.

post-modernism questioned the axiomatic assumptions of western civilization, with mixed results. the majority of people who despise it don't like having to figure out how to orient themselves in an environment without a central cultural narrative that everyone can refer to, hence the resurgence of the right and it's offerings of tradition and stability in a world that no longer has one. outside of the social and political realm, that is to say on the arts, post modernism has created an array of fascinating examinations of the underlying assumptions of the western literary tradition, however, we often find among the post-modernists, perhaps more than any other era of the arts, a strong vein of mediocrity. this can be seen most clearly with the idiots who mimicked duchamp by making self referential recreations of his urinal in different contexts. they were comments on a comment that continued ad nasuem, and this is where we hit the issue. post modernism in the arts simply cannot continue into perpetuity, it cannot sustain itself.

i do think though most movements in the art change due to being repeated ad nauseum like romanticism, modernism, etc.

what I meant to say was that it is at the end of its course and has no room to further evolve artistically.

/thread

explain what postmodernism is in 60 seconds without using meme words

protip: you can't

>the majority of people who despise it don't like having to figure out how to orient themselves in an environment without a central cultural narrative that everyone can refer to
but current meme """postmodernists""" have plenty of central cultural narratives like the original sin of the holocaust and imperialism, the existence of oppression, the idea of progress as the constant fight against oppression in an eternal civil rights movement, and plenty of things like that that remain unquestioned

Postmodernism is bad not because deconstructionism but for its somewhat arbitrary obsession with power dynamics and its hesitation to deconstruct its own conclusions. Postmodernist literature can be tiresome because of its obsession to wink at postmodernist literary critics, telling them, See, I know you're reading me and I know the tricks too. It may be amusing to some people, but I think it's it's shallow.

you're confusing watered down critical theorists aka sjws with post modernism.

it isn't, it's just currently a fashionable strawman because of reddit internet daddy

but there are no honest postmodernists except maybe hiding in some dark room in a university, in the public eye there's only people using postmodernism as a tactical resource

I think the criticism of all post modern lit being hollow in this way is a bit unfair. the metafictive winks as you call them can be very interesting, Pynchon is great at this, as is DFW.

that's why I was deliberately speaking very broadly about our retrospective understanding of what post modernism was and was deliberately avoiding whatever meme shit it is you're talking about.

even in that sense it's still quite meaningless, even if you go to the roots you find most of the authors had their own very clear agendas or were responding to very concrete authors and movements before them, and the "no grand narratives" meme kind of crumbles if you poke at it slightly

the "no grand narratives" kind of captures the atmosphere of confusion after the great wars, but it's very clear that new narratives solidified quickly even if unacknowledged ones and trying to pretend we believe in nothing since 1945 is just preventing us to seriously discuss the things we very clearly believe in, and their consequences

Yeah, you're right, but Pynchon doesn't use it just to be clever and he started doing it before it was beaten to death. It's the excessive cleverness what gets me.

who is "we" and if we believe in something where is its locus? narratives are held together by communities and mass media, transportation, and mass market consumerism has obliterated the average community. the internet has only exacerbated this process. the local community is the building block for the societal narrative, and it has been eroded by the material conditions of our times and there's and by the post modernist penchant for deconstruction. if you insist there is a cultural narrative we all still believe in i find you to be immediately suspect, as you're likely about to sell me something.

>inb4 internet communities

the internet offers a pale shadow of true human contact. we all know this and the increasing rates of loneliness in a time of supposed connectivity back this up.

I can see your frustration with that. Cleverness for it's own sake always comes across as a kind of sickening mental handjob the author is trying to give me, like they're desperate for my approval and I find them entirely unpalatable in their unabashed eagerness to please with hollow artifice.

the narratives are very clearly stated in what we do, not in what we say we do

yes, there's dissolution in the modern world, doesn't mean there aren't several narratives underlying that dissolution, even some of them celebrating the dissolution as something positive that we should embrace

It's ordering me to make a free choice

I would prefer not to

there's that insidious "we" again. I have my narrative and I know what I'm driving toward, I do not participate in a wider culture narrative because there is not one that reflects my values and helps me. in my aims. unless you're describing my perfunctory participating in social behavior, which is not a narrative because it has no end, it is only the means by which one navigates the increasingly labyrinthine social roles thrust upon the individual in society, and even this becomes more fractured by the day. I do not know who "we" is and what they think about this state of affairs, I can only offer that I myself feel a sense of freedom, opportunity, and a healthy dose of anxiety and unease in the current day.

nobody cares about your own personal history that you tell yourself in your head, you think medieval peasants didn't have one and you are special somehow? you think everybody has to actively and gleefully participate in a grand-narrative for it to exist and guide a society forward?

you are more spooked that i thought

>refuses to demonstrate existence of societal narrative in the modern day
>special buzzword
>spooked buzzword

stop reading things into my posts that are not there. your insistence of societal the existence of a societal narrative as a self evident fact is merely an assertion, and one i do not agree with. I never said or implied whatever it is you're babbling about in the rest of your post.

Veeky Forums comment threads always end up going in circles, go back to

Postmodernism itself isn't bad. Personally I only find the stuff that's 'anti-modernist' to be the bad stuff. And that's what I use as a rule of thumb. If it's against modernity, then bin.
Otherwise it's a crackpot conspiracy theory level of retardation which is way to broad in scope to suggest post-modernism as a whole as bad.
Best example I can give is Jordan Peterson plowing this idea, imagine how many brilliant works of literature are written off because of this guy, because they fall under a loose 'post-modernism' genre. And that's the root of the issue, It's saying one whole genre is crap because of a few bad apples. Like the second question you ask OP, defining Post-modernism is a feat in of itself.

Different poster from the one responding before.
Hopefully you realize that this personal narrative of yours isn't exclusive to you despite the infinite variables that have shaped your life. Your personal narrative has clearly been shaped by culture and the values of society and in that sense you contribute to the grand societal narrative. No matter how specific your narrative gets its a part of something bigger, something you at first don't consciously choose to participate in.

To this guy, correct me if I'm wrong, is what I am saying what you meant when you said he is part of the societal narrative?

This guy gets it