Brainlet here. What is postmodernism?

Brainlet here. What is postmodernism?

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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature
plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
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Impotent anger

The end of the human intellect.

insecure faggots pushing their faggotry on other faggots who probably deserve it

It's not feasible, like birds - what are birds? We just don't know.

The phenomenology of Maya made bare for all to see.

basically just judaism for gentiles

A bunch of French guys that were mad at Hegel

The French's revenge for WW2

pre-Socratic sophistry revived

Crazy shit m8

A group of intellectually disabled Frenchmen whose only contribution was to tell people they were incorrect without contributing or building up any substitutions to the constructs they claimed to despise and tear down.

The idea that everything is equally as valid

Except that's not the case. There are objectively good and bad things, though they be rare and far between.

I don't know.

The artistic movement that arose in response to Modernism, you absolute brainlet. Stop watching Jordan Peterson on Youtube

the(((french)))

You can interpret a text in many different ways.

its the dragon coming out of hell to save your father from cleaning your room, bucko

Postmodernism is, in the general sense, the state of Western society, culture and art "after" modernity. In a special sense, it is a political-scientific-artistic direction, which turns against certain institutions, methods, concepts and basic assumptions of modernity and tries to dissolve and overcome them. The representatives of postmodernism criticize the innovation drive of modernity as merely habitual and automated. They attest to the modernity's illegitimate prevalence of a totalitarian principle that carries on the societal level traits of despotism and that must be combated. Significant approaches of modernity were considered one-dimensional and fundamentally flawed. This is juxtaposed with the possibility of a diversity of equally juxtaposed perspectives, known as relativism. The demand for a principled openness of art also critically refers to the aesthetics of modernity.

a deracialized value structure in a multicultural society

Just because it was an artistic movement doesn't mean it was a good one.

Just saying.

taking a shit on a canvas and calling it heteronormative whiteness pls donate to my patreon

Kek.

>dragon saves your father from discovering your enormous cache of dragon porn
Thanks, dragon.

It's hard to give a blanket statement, but a corner stone of Postmodernism is being post-structuralist. That is, to belief or desire to take whatever the current status quo is a break it down entirely.
In arts, things like House of leaves do experimental things for the sake of subverting traditional structure for it's own sake (i.e. putting in multiple narrators that speak to eachother, cliffnotes and cliffnotes for those cliffnotes, random arrangements in paragraph compositions). This doesn't seem to have any purpose than for it's own sake.
In philosophy, it seeks to take out traditional modes of understanding the world such as logic, good vs evil, and objective reality to usually replace it with an understanding that 'might is right' (everything is bound through a string of power)

I could be wrong about all of this, but it's really hard to define something that is anti-structure with a structured narrative.

Nice post.

I found your post worth reading.

can we fucking not have this thread four times a day jesus christ

>I could be wrong about all of this
you are
because you're a moron

A CIA-backed plot to destroy Marxism

Can you tell us what it is?

Postmodernism is a philosophy specific to France in the years immediately after World War II.

WWII was devastating to the French identity. France had been a major world power, an important cultural influence, the place where all the important stuff happened. Not anymore, they weren't.

This is really important. When the real world no longer matches the "real world" you've learned and experienced since birth, life itself is surreal. Meaning makes no sense. Everything you assumed and knew to be objectively true turns out to be false? Sanity demands that you therefore challenge assumptions, question or even deny the possibility of objective reality.

In the 1980s, postmodernism was adopted as the "team uniform" of literature and arts departments in American universities. They started with the basic insight that all meanings are cultural, depending on the speaker and listener's frame of reference. Nothing controversial there. But then they added the postmodern rejection of authority to reject anything that would give meaning to a text. They insisted that you had to interpret text without reference whatsoever to cultural context, or even what the author herself said about the text. You could only interpret the text based on what the text alone said.

This "deconstruction" approach was widely mocked behind the literature professors' backs. Rejecting the plain meaning of a text, and substituting oneself as the authority over its meaning, was seen as an exercise in silliness and illogic. And they spawned a PC attitude that "truth" is whatever's true for you, which is not only an impediment to learning ("the facts contradict my lived experience, so they aren't true and by the way your lecture about them is an act of violence against me") but also, perhaps ironically, fully divorced from reality (tell the judge again your personal "truth" about the law, that'll work). Also, the things they wrote and the jargon they used were laughably incomprehensible.

That said, some postmodern approaches are still taken seriously. Foucault, for example, can probably be summed up as saying "it's not that there's no objective reality, it's just that the narratives we tell ourselves about it are flawed." For example, he points out that because language is literally (ha!) how we think, the limitations of language can make us blind to injustice.

Postmodern literature is typically written as a subversion of an expectation. "Oh, it's supposed to go like this? Well, this piece is going to go like that, instead." Sometimes the result comes off as a parody of whatever trope or expectation it's reacting against. Occasionally it works really well on its own, without reference to the context of what it's reacting against, being both novel and effective at the same time. Most of the time, it's just too experimental to work, like replacing your car's engine with a vat of kidneys.

But then again, who am I to say what postmodernism means?

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Death of the author isn't even post-structuralism, it's plain old structuralism. Why are you guys so fucking stupid?

Why are the french allowed to be intellectuals again?

Why do we still even allow them to continue going on at this point?

>author herself
Had to stop reading there.

Can you tell us what postmodernism is?

Postmodern philosophy: an umbrella term used for a bunch of French thinkers, mainly Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Lyotard.
Postmodern literature: another umbrella term used for a bunch of authors. Usually characterized by a reaction to modernist approaches to literature.
Note 1: the two aren't the same
Note 2: in neither case we're dealing with a movement, the term is a post-hoc umbrella term
Note 3: the two can intermingle occasionally but it isn't necessary
Note 4: the "skepticism of traditional metanarratives" thing is not what post-modern philosophy is about, but is a condition proper of contemporary society described by Liotard.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature this link has a good description of postmodern literature
plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ this link has a throughout description and explaination of the thought of postmodern philosophers.
If you want to read some postmodern literature, start with Calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler.
If you want to read some postmodern Phil, start with Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?" (obviously you should also read Kant's famous piece beforehand).
Hope that answers your question.

In a nutshell: skepticism of any unification.

>They started with the basic insight that all meanings are cultural, depending on the speaker and listener's frame of reference. Nothing controversial there.
So its axiomatic foundation is bullshit, then? Meaning is an interaction between culture and an inherent psychology that we evolved; it doesn't come entirely from culture

postmodernism is a formerly entirely chronological catch-all phrase for any movement following a modernist movement, co-opted by conservatives to conveniently denounce anything they don't like but refuse to acknowledge as a symptom of the alienation in capitalism

>capitalism causes alienation
>deconstructing all forms of group identity, whether religious, ethnic, cultural, racial, or linguistic, and attacking the concept for being tribal and divisive doesn't cause alienation
my least favorite leftist meme

So you can't tell me. Only links to wikipedia. Got it.

I wasnt agreeing with it, just stating what I thought postmodernism was

This looks like a good place to ask my question.This is from the City of Toronto's Official Plan:

>The sale or disposal of publicly owned lands in Parks and Open Space Areas is discouraged and no City owned lands in Parks and Open Space Areas will be sold or disposed of. However, City owned land in Parks and Open Space Areas may be exchanged for other nearby land of equivalent or larger area and comparable or superior green space utility.

What is the distinction between publicly owned land and city owned land?

>can you tell me what phlogiston is?
>well, it's not really a thing, it was believed to be the combustible component of 'burnable' materials but now we understand that--
>so you're telling me you don't know what it is great THANK YOU

they are using the two terms interchangeably here, but a public entity that is not the toronto municipality could conceivably own land within toronto's jurisdiction that was nevertheless outside toronto's control

Thanks, that clears things up. I am guessing publicly owned open lands are not too common, but they included it just in case.

Patrician post. I’d like to add that when looking for the origins of postmodernism, start with the world wars, particularly the second. Mistrust of institutions and the “innovation drive” of a capital and STEM-directed society as found in the postmodernist movement was begun by these wars and their associated mass-murder events.

>can you tell me what phlogiston is?
>It's a term generally used to describe things
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

>calling for consciousness after these institutions arguably caused two cataclysmic mass-death events, each breeding more efficient ways to kill, is bad because I’d rather be comfy

Literally the argument socialists make when they argue that economic inequality is a bigger social concern than increasing a nation's absolute wealth.

Also, the only thing debunking old tribal identities does is lead to the creation of new ones, ones that are often more dangerous because they haven't been tested and didn't evolve naturally over hundreds/thousands of years. This is how you get political extremism. Nazism was a way for the atomized and embarrassed German people to construct a "home" for themselves based on their bloodline. It wasn't a natural expression of German identity.

I told you. It's a term used to encapsulate certain philosophers AND a certain attitude in literature. They aren't a single movement and they aren't the same thing. The SEP is not wikipedia. Why did you ask me that question anyway if you don't actually want to know it? I gave you more than enough resources to inform yourself so do your homework and stop being a moron.

Does Pop art count as post-modernist? I always saw them as a reaction to modernists but they were so long ago.

A systematic dissolution of systems.

The curtailing of quotations around any word looking like '"art."'

The injection of glitter into the optic nerve of intellectuality.

A set of suppositions of presuppositions radioactively tagged for disposal to a location to be determined.

An equation satisfying the claim that one less one is equal to and or greater than one.

The maximization of minimalism: a factorial continuation of exponentiated variables within a cube-radix.

A virtuous vice president lambasting the reverse-gentrified cast of an historical musical.

The manifestation of arcane arts on an anonymous phantasmagoric agora for neo-autistic hobbledehoys.

Hanna-Barbera doing the Harlem Shake during the Harlem Renaissance in hot-pink himations.

>and pic related

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Argh matey

Read this, and you'll get it in every sense.

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And you gave me a fucking wikipedia article for homework? Nice.

genius

t. a superposition of sincerity and irony

A thoroughly post-modern answer. By this description, neither was their modernism, nor any category of thought. It is like saying there is no such thing as the Rocky Mountains, because none of the mountains within the range are exactly alike.

I gave you a book. Read it (I know you aren't used to read and your brain has probably went to shit after hundreds of JBP videos but the book is easy)

>arguably
It would be nice if they'd at least be willing to have the argument.

has gone*

You're making the assumption that postmodernists all to a man criticized the exact things you like while ignoring the ones you don't like. Have you been listening to Jordan Peterson lately?

Postmodernist methods of expression are well-suited to attacking the type of state the Nazis sought to form as inauthentic while encouraging more authentic relations to prevent people from feeling this way. In fact, lots of postmodernist literature is about the sort of atomization you speak of.

>I only pay attention to mass media and online outlets narrowly targeted to appeal to me
I can assure you that the argument is still being had to this day in academic circles.

The postmodernism i've read is focused primarily on critiquing ideas and institutions it perceives as pernicious, not on constructing or propagating healthy alternatives.

>language is literally how we think
But that's not true, you AIDS-ridden bum-pirate.

Do you not think in any language? Is it so inconceivable that the language you use has an impact on how you think?

Not him, but that's an outdated notion of how human thought works. Words arise out of thought, they don't create or confine thought.

Self-destruction

i want to fuck you in the arse and i'm not even british

Language has a huge influence on thought, especially since it is itself influenced by thought, forming a feedback loop. Look at Japanese culture (thought) and language and tell me they have no correlation whatsoever.

Linguistic relativity is an outdated concept. Even in your Japanese example it could just as easily be argued that the cultural factors that lead to the development of modern-day Japanese society also influenced the language's evolution. By the way, what about the Japanese language suggests a particular culture? Its orthography?

Saying something is outdated doesn't count as a refutation.
>cultural factors that lead to the development of modern-day Japanese society also influenced the language's evolution
I wouldn't deny that at all.
Japanese grammar is prone to ambiguity and because of the conventions regarding subjects and objects, it allows speakers to converse about things without disclosing their opinions on things.

I know JP and his fanboys use postmodernism as a catch-all boogeyman, but are they wrong for equating it with nihilism, subjective morality, and illogical kneejerk-rooted social politics? These all seem like logical progressions of an ideology that shrugs off objectivity and inherent meaning.

Depends on whether you'd like to judge a philosophical idea on it's own merits or on those of the actions of its adherents.

>it allows speakers to converse about things without disclosing their opinions on things.
Whenever people talk about the distinctions between languages (so-and-so language has over 50 words for snow!), you can almost always be certain that they're romanticizing and exoticizing the language they're less familiar with.

>Saying something is outdated doesn't count as a refutation.
Modern linguists either think that the idea's bunk, or that its effects are weak. Old school Sapir–Whorfism is completely outdated.

I'm using that example because I live in Japan. When you say that a book is interesting in English, we automatically forge a connection between you and the book. That isn't necessarily true in Japanese. You can logically say "the book is interesting, but I don't think it's interesting" in Japanese.

You're not even aware of how much of a brainlet you are.

Like usual, fpbp. This sums it up.

>You can logically say "the book is interesting, but I don't think it's interesting" in Japanese.
"People think the book is interesting."
"Some may consider the book interesting"
"The book may interest you"

Not him, but post-structuralism is broadly the idea that the perception of reality is necessarily mediated and constructed by the culture/language of the perceiver.

Nope

Exactly. You can clarify the subject (the one with the opinion in this case), but in English, if it isn't given, in many context, the subject is implied. To be fair, if we say something factual, we don't regard that as opinion ('It's sunny out' is not taken as an opinion. However, a lot of English humour, even here on Veeky Forums stems from the absurdity or whatnot of conflating fact with opinion when one is more strongly implied than the other).

In contrast, in Japanese, if you don't give the subject (opinion-haver), it's almost never implied. One dynamic of this linguistic mechanism is that people will suspect who the opinion-haver is ('He said the book is interesting but I wonder if HE thinks it's interesting') but, typically, will pretend they don't know unless it's made explicit.

I can't pretend to know whether or not this is true since I don't speak Japanese, but I hope you're not confusing the subject of a sentence with the grammatical person who's participating in the sentence. Those are two completely different things.

>people actually think this is a good post
If you listen closely, you can hear him sniffing his own farts.

Jargon and buzzwords do not a good post make. I respect them for what they do (keep plebs out of the discipline so only people who have put in the time to learn it can communicate about it), but they shouldn't be used this liberally or we risk parody.

>author herself
>author
>herself
Fuck off cunt.

The thing that came after modernism

The easiest way I could describe it is being incredulous towards any objective statements about art, literature, philosophy, etc. Basically, by the middle of the 20th century, the French decided that language as a whole was fucked, because the meanings that texts take on can only be determined from the context of other texts, and so the entire ground on which language stood was shaky and subjectively determined at best. Essentially no real convictions could ever be true because any conviction would have to operate on it's own terms and therefore be biased. A good example of why this train of thought started happening in academic circles at the time, even outside of fiction and art, that I just started reading about would be Godel's incompleteness theorem and Principia Mathematica. Russell and Whitehead set out to define a set of rules for symbolic logic that would rid mathematics of things like paradoxical sets arising from self-reference. Godel came along and proved that this was impossible, for any closed set of axioms must either be incomplete or incapable of proving itself. As a result of this kind of incredulity, art and philosophy becomes more about subjectivity. Analytics takes a back seat for the next 60 years, and philosophers make less proclamations and more denunciations, since nothing can be proven true. Authors write about the perspectives of schizophrenics and drug users, unreliable narrators become a thing, realism is no longer relevant. Paintings and Sculptures begin to focus less on conventional standards of beauty and begin to "push the boundaries," asking what is art? The act of how you are viewing art becomes as important as the art itself. Postmodernism is basically a big attempt at unlimited experimentation with performance, perspective, and criticism, because we've given up on trying to craft rules about how things should be done or seen.

I don't hear them, but I can hear you mouth-breathing, though.

You know when people say things like "stupidity is not knowing you're stupid", they're talking about people like you and attitudes like this.

>decided that language as a whole was fucked
Is this one of the proclamations and denunciations they ruled that shouldn't be done?
>Godel's incompleteness theorem
But none of the French postmoderns would bother with analytic philosophy, save for Lyotard who did read Wittgenstein.
>art and philosophy becomes more about subjectivity
>"push the boundaries," asking what is art?
The great subjects of subjectivity were answering the question by abandoning urinals in galleries as early as 1917, your whole post reeks of a creation myth.
>Analytics takes a back seat for the next 60 years
Yeah, by conquering philosophy departments all over the place, and not just in Angloland at that. Cue the German-accented teacher's lamentations to his colleague's Italian students that sub-departments (or whatever the hell they'd be called in English) with teams of professors dedicated to German idealism (and I mean revivals of it, not mere curiosities for the "museum" of the history of philosophy) are getting rarer in Germany itself.
>we've given up on trying to craft rules about how things should be done or seen
With the postmodern obligatory forced mandatory "ought" of the day being to ask who the hell this "we" might be.
What do we even need postmoderns for, when we could be sceptics? How about we do something honest instead and go back and be pastmoderns?

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I don't think postmodernism ever had much of a problem with criticism, and while I do think it is sad that at a lot of contemporary philosophy serves less as a vehicle to shepherd humanity nowadays in this batshit world, I don't believe that the pessimism towards ideals and conducts necessarily invalidates the whole movement. Whether or not postmodernism is a good thing is up to you to decide. I wasn't trying to argue for its validity, just explain it. I think the postmodernists themselves would describe their movement less as necessary or valid (an essentially impossible term in postmodern thought) than they would as inevitable, which seems fair to me. Obviously subjectivity was a thing in art long before postmodernism, but the subjectivity of the postmodernists was far more whimsical and surrealistic for its own sake, unlike, for example, the romantics, who focused on emotion and human conceptions of beauty. I would also like to point out that duchamp and dada were precursors to the postmodern movement, and although it wasn't really "a thing" until the 60's or so, a lot of late modernity was clearly shifting in that direction since World War I, so I don't really understand what you're getting at with this creation myth. It is sad that the variety we once had in academic philosophy has been severely reduced, and many of the new "ought" statements that arise from this culture of homogeneity are clearly contradictory and self-defeating, but I still find postmodernism to be interesting. You can feel free to be a sceptic, but one important point is that separates the two is that by establishing your scepticism you are operating on terms of what you think "scepticism" is, of which even postmodernism would be sceptical of! Obviously we've just gone down the rabbit hole and are likely to get absolutely nowhere, but I still think the implications for art can be fascinating (when not overtly stuffy and pretentious). Unfortunately this is very subjugating for philosophy, but at least there's thousands of years of philosophical thought you can still read and discuss. Philosophy is always changing, and just because you find the current standard to be dishonest (which it really is), doesn't mean you can't enjoy the dialogue.

It's the idea (fact) that white men are obsolete in today's world. In postmodernism, the ideal world is one where white men serve two purposes: physical labor, and being women's gay best friends, women are the rulers in charge of all things meaningful, with black men serving as a source for sexual release and reproduction.

good post

This unironically. I'll say it once more, it's the French.

>it is being used to write global policy without debate
>but they still let professors quibble about semantics in obscurity
Cool

>or example, the romantics, who focused on emotion and human conceptions of beauty
As if postmodern philosophers wouldn't have a problem with a Western instrumental reason that bullies muh feefees, or concern themselves with any nonhuman conception of beauty.
>a lot of late modernity was clearly shifting in that direction since World War I
If "a lot" of it had it really gone that way, as opposed to go full retard with totalitarian ideologies, perhaps the rest of the generally terrible idea that was the 20th century would have gone in some nicer direction. Think of Heidegger, whose books were all over the postmoderns, falling for the bait and praising Hitler and his hands, for fuck's sake! See? The story you're telling, or you've been told, is a creation myth.
>I don't really understand what you're getting at with this creation myth
Postmoderns like to claim other people's shit as theirs, when it has nothing to do with them, predating them as far as 50 years before them, when not some 23 centuries. Other times they say the May 1968 revolts in France started it, when important works like Madness and Civilization, Of Grammatology, Nietzsche and Philosophy, etc. were already in print by then, and others were works in progress about to be published. The people that are supposedly interested in emancipating others from ideologies choose instead to behave in a completely ideological manner, hence my suggestion of a quest for more scepticism and less bullshit.
>you are operating on terms of what you think "scepticism" is, of which even postmodernism would be sceptical of
I would simply do the Agambenian and Foucauldian thing, namely the archaeology of knowledge, and ask ye olden Greeks. No sceptic would ever need the alleged discoveries of the postmoderns, reinventors of the wheel, in order to entertain the notion one might get something wrong involving the ancient sceptics. Or any other topic.

Philosophy’s attempt to find a source of meaning after both the death of god and the failure of the universalist emancipatory political project (communism).

See Rick Rodrick’s lectures about 20th century philosophy.