Buried in posts

[robinturner]

Jesus, I write one post claiming that the Internet is no less literate than the rest of human discourse, and another on why postmodernism sucks donkey's balls, and I see more posts piling up in my LJ-filtered inbox than I have ever experienced.

So for those of you who can't be bothered to read all those posts:

1. The Internet is OK.
2. Postmodernism sucks donkey's balls.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

I almost ordered a Chocolate Serengeti
I love it. "The dessert of the real."

Please explain to me in a way I can understand just EXACTLY what postmodernism is....?

Short answer, I can't!

Long answer ...

One person who was offended at my piss-taking in academics_anon claimed that I was blindly criticising something I couldn't even define, but postmodernism is such a messy phenomenon that defies definition (which of course is not a criticism in itself - as Wittgenstein famously observed, you can't even provide a watertight definition of "game"). The standard definition is from pomo guru Lyotard: "incredulity toward metanarratives" ("metanarrative" being a rather inelegant translation of Lyotard's "Grand Recit"). The problem with this definition is that the key term is part of the jargon of the school of thought it is supposed to be defining: it's like defining Marxism as "a political philosophy based on dialectical materialism".

OK, deep breath. A metanarrative, as far as I can understand it, is something like a worldview or set of assumptions from which we construct texts - the things we say, whether these are scientific theories or blockbuster movies. Up to and including the modern era (which according to postmodernist theorists is over) each age was dominated by a metanarrative. Now we're in the postmodern era, there is no dominant metanarrative, so it's a kind of theoretical and cultural free-for-all.

In terms of culture, this makes some kind of sense. Postmodernism started as a movement not in philosophy but in architecture, as a reaction to the modernism of people like LeCorbusier and the Bauhaus. It went down well, largely because it encouraged architects to stop designing ugly and impractical buildings. A similar movement in music gave composers permission to write music that didn't hurt people's ears (Philip Glass was one of the movers and shakers here, and described his music as "postmodern"). The basic idea was that it was OK to mix themes from different historical periods, different countries and "high" and "low" culture. All very good, at least if you're the kind of person whose idea of heaven isn't sitting in a skyscraper listening to Schönberg.

The problems started with literature, partly because to keep their eras distinct, postmodernist theorists felt obliged to define authors like Eliot, Pound and Joyce as "modernist". This strikes me as silly, since one thing they do is combine bits of different texts (what pomos call "intertextuality") in exactly the way that postmodern writers are supposed to do.

But things really got silly when the pomos started on science. Science, they claim, is part of the modernist metanarrative, and as such is no more objectively "true" (pomos love to use scare-quotes) than medieval theology or finger-painting. Moreover (getting political here) science is a tool of the white male elite to oppress women, native peoples and cute furry animals (sorry about the sarcasm, but this is a very sore point). They make the elementary mistake of confusing science with scientism, the latter being a collection of rather unscientific assumptions of what science is and what it can do for us. This leads to such absurdities as Irigaray's notorious description of Newton's Prinicipia as "a manual for rape."