Will postmodernism lead us to our ruin? Should we go back to the modernism ideas or even older philosophy?

Modernism is the foundation for coherent civilization. Catering to amoral nutcases, drug users, people who wish to reshape reality to how they'd prefer it to be is how we destroy ourselves. The enlightenment(which is worshiped by modernists) led to science--vaccines, physics, modern medicine-- now postmodernism has accelerated the deintellectualization of the west.

How? I doubt many here would enjoy being with the prototypical 50s housewife style female either.

this is an overly simplistic view, but so is it's inverse, that modern society has led to nothing but genocide, nuclear war, terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, diabetes, pornography addiction, etc etc.

The truth is that the Good and the Evil are symmetric. Any rise in Good is accompanied by an equal rise in Evil.

neo-geo-classicism

You are a silly man.

>The truth is that the Good and the Evil are symmetric. Any rise in Good is accompanied by an equal rise in Evil
So let's dehumanize ourselves in the name of stability!

So, social constructionism is both good and evil? This aspect of postmodernism asserted by Focoult, Berger, Satre, and even novelists like Pinecone is toxic. It's not evil or good, but genuinely asserts that science, what made us advance to this point in history is all subjective bullshit. That's called stupid.

the inconvenient truth for ill-read reactionary frog posters; ww2 was largely fuelled by modernist thinking. the beginnings of pomo was an attempt to reason out the horror that it caused.

Not that user, and I don't necessarily agree with him, but most of the data seems to suggest that those 50s housewives were on average happier and more content than even successful female lawyers, business women and the like, to say nothing of the unsuccessful female professional types and females engaged in wageslave-type work and menial labour. Of course, those 50s housewives also seemed to be happier than males in the work force as well, then or now, so make of that what you will.

I wouldn't really blame any of that squarely that on post-modernism though.

see

you miss the point. trying to reintegrate modernism because pomo is destructive makes no sense considering the level of destruction seen when modernism was in vogue. no one is saying modernism = all bad things.

Fair enough.

*perversion of modernism and economic instability caused WW2
Doesn't matter because most postmodernists are Marxist or socialist and the destruction of truth in nations plagued by Marxist thought precluded mass murder

lol. bad bait my dude.

>I doubt many here would enjoy being with the prototypical 50s housewife style female either.
Why?

Highlighting the absurdity of saying modernism caused WW2.

I think post-modernism is quite useful. Because it means that you can nihilistically laugh at all the bourgeois liberals who opened Pandora's box and simply tell them that their interpretation of the world is one among an infinite amount, and that there's no reason to privilege theirs.

It's fun watching them implode when you do.

Hello Mr. Bannon.

or it shows a lack of awareness, that the ussr and stalin both happened in a high period for modernist art and thinking.

>po-mo thread

awesome. its the early 90's again

>insisting on the perspectival nature of intepretation
>"Hello Mr. Bannon"

toplel

So, you're saying Marxism is modernism? So why are all the postmodernists Marx lovers? Derrida, Foucoult, Sartre, and their buddies were all unabashed marxists. Destroyed your own argument

But Marxism is the ultimate grand narrative, so those people aren't postmodernists

Frenchfags aren't the only Marxists In the world, they're only the least successful.

no, I'm saying those genocides you refer to happened under the umbrella of modernism. why are early pomo thinkers influenced by marx? one reason is a reaction toward internationalism against the kind of nationalism which set off the domino effect of ww1, leading into ww2.

True, but they are venerated as such. so, founding postmodernists were hypocrites.

Marxism certainly is modernistic. It rejects anything supernatural, and is republican and exalts science as the pathway to Communism. You literally can't get any more modernistic than that.

>founding postmodernists were hypocrites
I can't tell If this is supposed to be a discovery or statement, 90% of French postmodernists criticism of each other are that their postmodernists and misread Marx.

>Prototypical 50s housewife
>Implying she didn't work etc.
When will this meme end? Millions of women worked part time in the 50s and 60s or even full time in teaching and nursing. This was started by 70s feminists trying to garner social rights by claiming they had economic opportunity, but this was false.

Had *no* economic opportunity.

We need to go back.

Tfw you realize being an anarconickcageist is as postmodern as you can get politically

Jesus fucking christ. YES, Marxism is part of Modernism. Generally when speaking of Modernism as a historical/political period, you're talking about Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism. The three "Grand Narratives" of the 21st century.

WW2 was supposed to settle that score, but in the end Capitalism became morally bankrupt because it only won by being the first to develop nuclear weapons.

Modernism is the belief that history is a story of upwards progress and achievement, 'a climb up the mountain' so to speak. Marxism, Fascism and Democracy all held this in common (even Fascism with its neo-classicist aesthetic pretensions).

POST-modernism, or POST-marxism, such as the pomo thinkers that seem to be hated so much around here (despite having not been read by people who hold those opinions), were a reaction to the mass destabilization of ww2 and the society that followed.

If "post-modern" writers refer to Marx, or Hegel, or Nietzsche or any number of modernist philosophers, it's because they're trying to salvage those bodies of thought, to critique them, to pull something useful out of the wreckage of the modern world.

This whole "Pomo's destroyed Truth" is fucking bullshit. Auschwitz destroyed Truth. Hiroshima destroyed Truth. The Gulags destroyed Truth.

No we don't. We need to manifest something new.

Will to power my melanin-enriched friend.

>The three "Grand Narratives" of the 21st century.

That should read 20th century, my bad, but hopefully that is obvious enough.

I like you. I like your hatred for all these pop ideologies. I like that you point out it's already been done. Hybridization and globalism is the only thing left worth pursuing.

Postmodernism is what happened when Marxist intellectuals realized the Soviet Union was shit and they couldn't defend it without losing face anymore.

Instead of admitting they were wrong, they started to work to dismantle reality. It's better to say "objective reality doesn't exists" than to say "communism was bad and we were wrong to support it."

Having said that, is quite right that post-modernism can be useful to anti-communists of a reactionary bent who wish to oppose both revolutionary socialism and progressive liberalism and are too self-conscious to appeal to God and tradition unironically. Just say that "Hyperborean Aryans from Atlantis" are just a a small, local metanarrative that displaces the universal narrative of progress, in the name of the "multiplicity of theoretical standpoints".

>but in the end Capitalism became morally bankrupt because it only won by being the first to develop nuclear weapons
I don't even

Post modernism is really just a continuation of modernism.

you're wasting your time with frogposters. they have no interest in the history of thought, which is why they don't know these introductory facts.

>post-modernism can be useful to anti-communists of a reactionary bent

I'm not an "anti-communist of a reactionary bent".

My point of that statement was to say that the insistence that grand narratives don't exist, or are axiomatically wrong because they are open to infinite interpretation, applies to every single ideology and narrative.

But this seems to be completely ignored by literature professors who spend their time perusing through classical literature checking off racism, sexism or classism as if the same kind of deconstruction can't be applied to their own worldview.

Egalitarianism for example is clearly just the psychological projection of a specific kind of bourgeois and affluent elite that basically hasn't experienced a single day of struggle in their life.

But Sartre advocated marxism. Either way, social constructionism is the dissolution of truth. Sorry, but if you are a pomo fan, then evil isn't objective, just like monogamy, and genders. Capitalism didn't create the bomb, the expansion of government did. The free market didn't just compete it's way to nuclear weapons.

>Modernism is the foundation for coherent civilization.
It's a nice ideal but that civilization never materialized or could without total homogeneity and all cultures first being destroyed or assimilated, universalism always ends up becoming genocidal, it doesn't matter if it's liberalism, fascism or communism

Where does this stuff come from? Like what writers or bloggers or podcasts are you people listening too?

Genuinely concerned. This revisionism towards Modernism=The Good Old Days is bizarre to me.

well nowadays society is clearly miserable and nihilistic. Maybe that is why

WWII and its buildup was the epitome of modernist thought. On both sides, we saw extermination carried out in the most efficient and scientific ways possible. Stalin and the USSR are prime examples of the modernist mentality applied to control/eliminate the masses.

>Modernism=The Good Old Days

I never said any such thing in this entire thread.

When you have trannies wishing to implement newspeak, rapant hedonism, drug use venerated by college profs, and music is shit, it's easy to see how people want to return to rationalism.

I don't buy this is a "natural" reaction. You didn't just develop a dislike of Pomo theory out of the blue. How'd you even get exposed to it? What influenced you to hold these opinions?

It's one thing to say "I hate trannies" or whatever, but where did "I hate Foucault because he likes trannies" come from?

I don't dislike postmodern theory at all, like I said hereIt's actually quite freeing to me, and also quite funny, because I can laugh at all the absolutists.

I don't even understand what the fuck your asking, or do you think people criticizing French theory is new?

>You didn't just develop a dislike of Pomo theory out of the blue
Most people never liked "Pomo theory" in the Anglosphere, are you from France?

Ah, I took your post for sarcasm.

he's asking where this specific mis-reading of pomo and modernism came from.

I read madness and civilisation, pynchon, ect. hung out with that crowd. Went to orgy parties, did drugs, and learned how pomo as a philosophy implemented ruined my life.

This man attempted to bring back modernism. Didn't work.

m8, if anything if you have read anything that doesn't belong to our generation and shares different fundamental thoughts, you can see how fucked up nowadays society is. It's simple be it in ancient, classical, medieval, renaissance, modern times, people had an humane reason to strive and live for, after WW2 fear has become so prevalent that is actually dehumanizing the world. Post-Mod wants to enhance humanity by removing its bad parts, when the bad and good parts are what makes us human in the end

again this "most people" and "people"
Who are these people? Most people I know have never heard of Post-modern theory, they've never heard the names Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, etc.

So, if you guys aren't reading this stuff, why do you know about it? Who are the authors or other influencers who are telling you about this obscure branch of philosophy? Did it come from your teachers? Youtube? Twitter? Books with authors and titles?

Also, I am not a frenchman.

Fair comment. I thought that other user meant to suggest it ruined women for us, the sexy white males, not for themselves.

See above and then add because they wouldn't read anything better than the equivalent of Harry Potter even then.

Probably. Who knows.

If there's one thing that is well defined by post-modernism is that it's largerly a reaction to the failure of modernism, and the failure of modernism is marked with 20th century totalitarianism.

Do you people even read or have you just came across the word post-modern and decided this is why your life is awful?

>That's called stupid.
How? How is it stupid? It exists purely to our own faculty of understanding and reasoning. Our own conceptions of meaning; our own authority over truth value. We don't know truth as an autonomous figure; we cannot validate our understanding of the world around us through anything else but ourselves. This "subjective bullshit" is all we have, and all we have to verify itself/

It's a matter of education.
Prior to studying the postmoderns myself I had a view of so similar a conviction that there was only a short time before I considered myself conservative.
The world is far more complex and modernism isn't that of the rationalist's utopia.

Exactly! you can use the methodology against other post-modernists. A world of complexity unparalleled by that of science.

I can't tell if your data mining or trolling, you don't need to know post-modern theory to understand that a post-modernist professor hit somebody over the head with a bike-lock last weekend.

But this is Veeky Forums so they probably learnt it from Chomsky.

Ah, I see your problem, you're american.
Egalitarianism is in itself one of the main tennets of modernism (Igualité, Liberté, Fraternité), but post-colonial thought is a negation of egalitarianism / humanism.

Egalitarianism is the notion that everyone is absolutely equal and should be equal in the eyes of the law and so on, the evolution of the renassaince and neo-classicism. Post-modernism realizes the claim to equality for one person always leads to the removal of someone else's equality and seeks to remedy that.

I'm not even saying I agree with them, but their attempts to remedy it are much better than saying "white men are prosecuted" two billion times on a polynesian claymation bbs node.

>Post-Mod wants to enhance humanity by removing its bad parts

This is literally modernist thinking, not post-modern thinking.

Here is some post-modern thinking on the nature of Good and Evil from Jean Baudrillard's "The Spirit of Terrorism"

"...the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other — far from it. In metaphysical terms, Evil is regarded as an accidental mishap, but this axiom, from which all the Manichaean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil derive, is illusory. Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated. Ultimately, Good could thwart Evil only by ceasing to be Good since, by seizing for itself a global monopoly of power, it gives rise, by that very act, to a blowback of a proportionate violence."

Retard or ESL?

>he's asking where this specific mis-reading of pomo and modernism came from
from postmodernists

>social constructionism is the dissolution of truth

You're very cleary a retard hellbent on redeeming american capitalism, but society has never been given, it has always been assumed as part of human order, even in religious societies. I suggest you read some Bataille (or even Schmitt)

You people are completely afraid to learn anything new.

>Ah, I see your problem, you're american.

No I'm not. I'm Norwegian.

>their attempts to remedy it

They don't remedy anything. Postmodernism is called "deconstruction" for a reason, it's not called "construction".

>Post-modernism realizes the claim to equality for one person always leads to the removal of someone else's equality and seeks to remedy that.
That's still fundamentally egalitarian, it's just more extreme.

Science is inherent truth, or at least the closest thing we can get to it. When a person deconstructs concrete evidence because it doesn't work with their worldview, they become insane. Accept consciousness is a flawed operating program. Your brain mispercieves reality constantly, and has been proven by neuroscience. When atheists abandoned faith, they became arrogant in thinking that their own faculties produce better results. A faction of atheists reject science for social constructionism because of narcissism.

>Postmodernism is called "deconstruction" for a reason
lol. wat.

If Post-Modernism wants to be taken seriously outside of Academia it should try something other than Socialist propaganda.

"In the traditional universe, there was still a balance between Good and Evil, in accordance with a dialectical relation which maintained the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe, come what may — not unlike the way the confrontation of the two powers in the Cold War maintained the balance of terror. There was, then, no supremacy of the one over the other. As soon as there was a total extrapolation of Good (hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, exclusion of death and of any potential adverse force — triumph of the values of Good all along the line), that balance was upset. From this point on, the equilibrium was gone, and it was as though Evil regained an invisible autonomy, henceforward developing exponentially.

Relatively speaking, this is more or less what has happened in the political order with the eclipse of Communism and the global triumph of liberal power: it was at that point that a ghostly enemy emerged, infiltrating itself throughout the whole planet, slipping in everywhere like a virus, welling up from all the interstices of power: Islam. But Islam was merely the moving front along which the antagonism crystallized. The antagonism is everywhere, and in every one of us. So, it is terror against terror. But asymmetric terror. And it is this asymmetry which leaves global omnipotence entirely disarmed. At odds with itself, it can only plunge further into its own logic of relations of force, but it cannot operate on the terrain of the symbolic challenge and death — a thing of which it no longer has any idea, since it has erased it from its own culture."

See some Pomo thinkers even have negative opinions of Islam! I hope you guys learned something about Post-modern theory today!

full essay
insomnia.ac/essays/the_spirit_of_terrorism/

The main issue with the postmoderns is that they are still fundamentally concerned with objective truth, just on a different level. They cannot accept certain unfounded axioms, even if they may be more conductive to life, because they are desperately looking for the truth that can be chiseled away by questioning everything. It's just more advance dialectics, different in extremity but not in kind.

so you guys read post-modernists and didn't understand them and now have a narrative that isn't related to the history of the development of modernism and post-modernism? what's it like to be that dumb?

Deconstructing classical literature, or contemporary politics into statements of racism, classism or sexism is what postmodernists do.

And they don't create solutions to anything. They simply point shit out.

And why would try to create solutions? You could use the deconstructive method against the solutions.

Postmodernism is not called deconstruction, you fucking dolt. Postmodernism is a movement of ART, postmodernity is a HISTORICAL CONDITION, deconstruction is a TECHNIQUE created by a PHILOSOPHER who lived during postmodernity. These things are all very different and the only way to unite them is, ironically, creating a very postmodern narrative.

It aims for equality, but it's not egalitarian, these are different things. Egalitarianism is inherently liberal, if those people are all such adherent of marxism as they are, they should be against this notion.

You people are way out of your sandbox, none of you engaged in any of the texts you claim to be against, using half-concepts from youtube celebrities as academical truth when in reality, that sort of notion is in itself a poor understanding of already poorly digested academic trends of the 90s by americans who couldn't bother to actually understand continental philosophy and just improvised as they went along.

Post-modernism is very seriously taken outside of academia, marketing, politics, entertainment, all of those things have been extremely filtered through postmodernism and anyone who has any passing idea about what postmodernism actually is can see it pretty clearly.

>"...the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other — far from it. In metaphysical terms, Evil is regarded as an accidental mishap, but this axiom, from which all the Manichaean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil derive, is illusory. Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated. Ultimately, Good could thwart Evil only by ceasing to be Good since, by seizing for itself a global monopoly of power, it gives rise, by that very act, to a blowback of a proportionate violence."
What I meant from removing the bad parts was not removing an evil mishap from happening due to good things. But from stopping the people from doing good simply because evil can happen. That is the dehumanizing point I said. Humanity in all generations strove for something be it by religion, science or other means. But nowadays fear has become the main mean to the point of people, societies and humanity in general fearing their own ambitions and settling for the status quo.

This thread is a hoot, Its literally just undergrads panicking nobody is going to take their critical theory degree seriously. I love you guys.

Doesn't change the fact that probably the biggest uniting thread in every modernist narrative is the creation of the New Man and the New Life and so on.

>Deconstructing classical literature, or contemporary politics into statements of racism, classism or sexism is what postmodernists do.
oh, you don't know what those words mean. that's what I thought.

Yes I do. But you're welcome to exit the thread if you don't want to discuss the topic any longer.

>What I meant from removing the bad parts was not removing an evil mishap from happening due to good things. But from stopping the people from doing good simply because evil can happen. That is the dehumanizing point I said. Humanity in all generations strove for something be it by religion, science or other means. But nowadays fear has become the main mean to the point of people, societies and humanity in general fearing their own ambitions and settling for the status quo.

Your description of contemporary society is a postmodern description. It fits very much inline with texts like Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" or The Invisible Committee's "To Our Friends" or Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" or Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage" and many many other post-modern books.

>Chomsky
>post-modern
I'm starting to wonder if the post-modernists in this thread have encountered post-modernism outside of Pynchon.

you say you do but the evidence says you don't. if you did then you would know deconstructionism doesn't exist outside literary theory. there is no political deconstructionism. you would also realise that post-modernism and deconstructionism are no synonyms and can not be used interchangeably.

So, since postmodernity repudiates modernism, why are postmodern topics at university, such as critical theory, literary criticism and colonial studies et.al, full of liberals and socialists/Marxists?

Do they lack the courage of their convictions?

areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/
Thoughts on this?

Postmodernism won't lead us to our ruin. The downfall of civilization was caused by two things
1) Allowing the masses to read the Bible, which gave retards the impression that they could understand the occult, the complex, etc
2) The sexual revolution of the 20th century which will lead to a resurgence of fascism and reactionary, insincere religious beliefs motivated by sexual insecurity and which will only be quelled through violence
Sources: my mom made me go to an Episcopal church as a kid, and my dad gave me a Houellebecq book in high school when I was staying at his place for the weekend