Explain on retard terms what is postmodernism and how does it relate to the current cultural zeitgeist

Explain on retard terms what is postmodernism and how does it relate to the current cultural zeitgeist.

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Postmodernism is shit

The currect cultural zeitgeist is also shit

So it goes...

your the on retard term

my favorite artist is kanye west, he is so postmodern

Postmodernism is a "suspicion about (meta)narratives" (Lyotard)

Oldism was just whatever it was, people were sincerely religious or patriotic or whatever

A century or two of radical changes in human society like the industrial revolution and the "social problem" it caused, all kinds of new revolutions and forms of nationalism and secularism and scientific advances (not just inventions but the birth of modern sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, etc., the "study of man") sprang up in this period, science itself was born in this period of post-Enlightenment secular rationality, rational state organisation, rational architecture, self-conscious art styles and self-consciousness about the right way to be self-conscious about what you're doing

People were simultaneously unsure of the new world that they were living in, lacking faith in the old ways of doing things because they had clearly been overshadowed by the newness of the industrial world, and excited and confident about their ability to control things

So modernism comes along as a lot of different forms of people self-confidently trying to control or shape the world or feeling like they "have the answer" to how new and confusing everything is, whether it be living by hardcore rational science or new forms of radically organised states, also new forms of post-dogmatic religious mysticism

This resulted in the 20th century blowing its asshole out on fascism, nuclear bombs, communism that turned into horrific famines and atrocities, capitalism that will melt African children's eyeballs to make into wax for your car, meaningless rationalised existence where everything is pointless (Fordism, wage slavery), modernist art and art for art's sake was hollow and doesn't make us feel spiritually alive anymore, everything is a gray shitty dried-up turd, we're living at the end of history and humanity has no more hope or dreams because dreams are for naive people

Postmodernism is essentially this self-awareness about how stupid the modernists were to think that they were so self-aware of how the world works that they could simply and finally pin it down. All the modernist "narratives" of how the world works and how they could fix it. It's hostility to naivete (read DFW's "E Unibus Pluram," where he talks about DeLillo) and naive hope or commitment to anything, the sense that everything has been done, the sense that everything has already been tried. It's also obsessed with deconstruction and undermining, because the old narratives are still crystallized as institutions, and people like Foucault can show that an institution trying to look out for people's well-being actually does some sort of upside-down oppressive voodoo where it ruins everyone's lives and becomes tyrannical. Everything sucks, hope sucks, trying sucks. This filters into art as "look how self-aware I am that I'm too self-aware to be naive." etc

read this as "so he is postmodern" and kek'd hard

i wish thats what i wrote

>This resulted in the 20th century blowing its asshole out on fascism, nuclear bombs, communism that turned into horrific famines and atrocities, capitalism that will melt African children's eyeballs to make into wax for your car, meaningless rationalised existence where everything is pointless (Fordism, wage slavery), modernist art and art for art's sake was hollow and doesn't make us feel spiritually alive anymore, everything is a gray shitty dried-up turd, we're living at the end of history and humanity has no more hope or dreams because dreams are for naive people
edgy

no it's just postmodern

Ultraminimalism favored by too many C.Y. writers is deeply influenced by the aesthetic
norms of mass entertainment. Indeed, this fiction depends on what’s little more than a
crude inversion of these norms. Where television, especially its advertising, presents
everything in hyperbole, Ultraminimalism is deliberately flat, understated, “undersold.”
Where TV seeks everywhere to render its action either dramatic or melodramatic, to
move the viewer by displaying constant movement, the Minimalist describes an event
as one would an object, a geometric form in stasis; and he always does so from an emo-
tional remove of light years. Where television does and must aim always to please, the Catatonic writer hefts something of a finger at subject and reader alike: one has only toread a Bret Ellis sex scene (pick a page, any page) to realize that here pleasure is neither a subject nor an aim. My own aversion to Ultraminimalism, I think, stems from its
naive pretension. The Catatonic Bunch seem to feel that simply by inverting the values
imposed on us by television, commercial film, advertising, etc., they can automatically
achieve the aesthetic depth popular entertainment so conspicuously lacks. Really, of
course, the Ultraminimalists are no less infected by popular culture than other C.Y.
writers: they merely choose to define their art by opposition to their own atmosphere.
The attitude betrayed is similar to that of lightweight neo-classicals who felt that to be
non-vulgar was not just a requirement but an assurance of value, or of insecure scholars
who confuse obscurity with profundity. And it’s just about as annoying.

DFW btfoing some talentless hack

oops, posted this in the wrong thread.

Postmodernism is the idea that aesthetic value can be derived from the deliberate manipulation of the viewing experience of a work, as opposed to solely the content of said work.

In practice this has simmered down from an early and unrefined practice of making narrative forms themselves into rollercoasters of varying depth and complexity as an almost solely academic ploy (i.e. Moby Dick or, much more intentionally, Ulysses) into a cynical half-assed means of circumventing the long standing traditions of judging narrative quality. PoMo is hated because it has come to a foreseeable and oft-anticipated "gotcha!" moment relied upon by those intelligent enough to command language but without the fundamental experience crucial to expressing creativity.

For a simpler understanding look at the transformation of reactionary post-World War I artstyles such as DaDaism into the mess that is literal-shitting-in-the-street subjectivist art.

Was going to start a thread about this, but I may as well ask here:

What comes after post-modernism? How could anything follow relativity? (I.e., if it has first been accepted).

Meta postmodernism.

modernism was critical of how bad things are


postmodernism is critical of how bad things still are, and how nobody has done anything to change or stop it

He's pretty experimental considering that he's so famous and mainstream.

It's a meme you dip

>What comes after post-modernism? How could anything follow relativity? (I.e., if it has first been accepted).

you want some of this here post-structuralism? It's basically an offshoot with MORE performance and aesthetics. huehuehuehue

>Meta postmodernism.

>you want some of this here post-structuralism? It's basically an offshoot with MORE performance and aesthetics. huehuehuehue

Please explain more, if you have the time. It'll do me good.

Post modernism rejects grand, all encompassing ideas, systems of thought, and concepts. And I mean everything. This includes the concept of truth.

It is utter madness, people argue about ideas while rejecting the idea that anything is ultimately true. They pick apart every theory at their foundation by asserting that everything underlying them is just relative to everything else, including the idea of structured thought.

One time I went on a trip to Ireland and met my sister and a couple of her friends in Dublin. I noticed right away these two girls were talking behind my sister's back and mocking her and it annoyed me more and more as the day went on. So at dinner when my sister went to the bathroom I called them out on it, asking why they bothered going all the way to Ireland with her, and further, asking why the fuck I was even there if they didn't even like my sister. I don't know what was I expecting. They just acted like they didn't know what I was talking about. They kept on denying which got me increasingly enraged and eventually blurted out three or four times the most cringeworthy of lines, something like, "Jesus Christ its not like I'm schizophrenic or something I wasnt imagining what I was seeing." Thankfully they left that night (without talking to my sister again, mind you) and I got to tour County Armagh in peace

So from the enlightenment until vaguely end of WWII and Vietnam war you had these modernists rolling around. People like Hegel, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Newton (just giving examples from several fields), people that believed that everything in the world was organized around a structure that we just needed to figure this structure out and then we can rationalize our behavior around it and move towards the "end of history" or the final point of development. This structure was math for Newton and the spirit of freedom for hegel. You get the point, some regular "empirical" positivism.

Now after WWII you have a group of, especially French, literary critics who say. "Hol up, what if these structures don't just exist naturally, what if humans actually create them??? That way there is no universal end of history just a perpetually creative group of societies. So people like Foucault and Heidegger step in and try to show how a lot of these constructs that we have are totally fabricated. The upside to this, is that we, as human collectives, are in total control of our future because create all these structures that we live in. The downside is that nothing has intrinsic meaning on its own and only has meaning when humans ascribe meaning to it. Major department from neo-platonic thought.

Step in the post-structuralists just a little later. Derrida, Deleuze, (and late-stage Foucault) and these people want to deconstruct everything. Deconstruction is the process of looking at a structure and understanding its foundations, its history, the words and thoughts that make it what it is, and how it came to be the way it is. What these people are concerned with is not to break everything apart, but to find the narrator in all these structures. Modernist thought was convinced that the narrator had to remain as objective as possible, and in doing so forgot that the narrator himself had creative agency and was a productive force. So these post-structuralists want to "find" the author and understand the environment that led him to construct his narrative in the way that he did so that they can formally build on it or dismantle it.

There is an excellent professor who explained deconstruction in a neat little metaphor. Professor Paul Fry asks us to imagine that we are on the Eiffel Tower, looking over Paris and observing it. We begin to see the city unfold beneath us, and spread outwards from the Eiffel Tower until its outskirts. Everything seems organized around the tower and all we have to do now is sit and observe.

In this process did we not forget however that the Eiffel Tower itself is created out of Paris and has an influence on how paris is organized so you need to be aware of your vantage point and how it leads you in constructing your narrative is all.

>communism that turned into horrific famines and atrocities
pure ideology

>edgy
calling things edgy is very post-modern

>How could anything follow relativity?
meta-modernism

In retard terms

>Modernism
"I sincerely believe X is real/good/important"

>post-modernism
"X is bullshit you naive retard"

>meta-modernism
"X is bullshit but I believe it anyways"

Mockery has become a tool of promotion rather than opposition. It's weird.

>County Armagh
fucking why? It's a flyover county.

I had free lodging with a couple of family friends in Cross. It's a short enough drive to Belfast or Dundalk

thank you for this post user.
>t. newbie making strides

*marxist leninism

are you happy now?

I like this.

Self-aware and cynical with values. I'm not sure that's always so distinguished from post-modernism though.

These things are more descriptive than prescriptive anyway.

post modernism is the super-structural expression of the rise of multinational finance capital and mass media, not whatever dumbshit lyotard says about how postmodernism is the spirit of freedom spitting on a hammer and sickle

its most salient features as a cultural field are a new and distinct referentiality, the flattening of history into its aesthetic trends, and "de-spatialization", a deepening tendency towards disorientation and dislocation

read jameson, baudrillard, probably derrida

metamodernism is the dumbest fucking shit possible and everyone associated with it will be ashamed of their sophomoric thought some day

marxism leninism is incredibly good nerd

>Mockery has become a tool of promotion rather than opposition. It's weird.
This drives your point home nicely for me, thanks user.

What does this have to do with post modernism?

>kanye west
>experimental
choose one

New Insincerity or metamodernism

i think the term post-truth is pretty gay, but I think it captures the cultural zeitgeist surrounding politics pretty well

i'm actually interested in this thread why is this board so dead reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Imo its rude to question my interpretation of OP's question

hey me too
how postmodern

m.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4

It's not simple, so you can't really go full-retard-terms, but here's a damn fine poetics (so to speak, since that very idea is antithetical to postmodernism): anglican.nb.ca/programs/formation/1309_leadership/powell_pfb.pdf

Here is a bullet list of ideas, though:
- Decentralization of authority
- High culture and Low culture are bullshit; there is no distinction
- "Art" is dead
- We're so good at figuring out periods of history that we use them aesthetically; history is dead
- Meta. Meta-meta. Meta-meta-meta. So fucking meta you can't even. (explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/917:_Hofstadter)

For the expert-level tome, see "Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Frederick Jameson (although it's obviously dated, it's amazing if you can wade through it).

In short, the mistake people make with Postmodernism is in assuming a prescriptive rather than descriptive tone. That is, Postmodernism attempts to express what is rather than what should be. It's about awareness and analysis, and awareness of your analysis, and awareness of your awareness of your analysis of your awareness of your analysis. It should hurt your brain, and it should break you. If you're not broken, you don't get it.

Also, it's like Richard Feynman describing Quantum Mechanics: Anyone who says they understand it doesn't.