on post-modernism from PHIL-LIT-L

[Peter Ganick]

as a devil's advocate i quote from a post of
paul stone's post PHIL-LIT...it does bring
up some issues worth considering...

--posted to fop-l by peter ganick...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Postmodernists don't even consider the world as most people recognize it.
They live in an insular, theoretical world in which all is imagined and
created anew each time their fingers meet the keyboard. Everything is a
'zeitgeist' since their time is never a time. It's always post-modern. They
seem to have taken relativism to its illogical conclusion; but they
act/live as if the world doesn't matter. This is what troubles me. Albert
Camus, when confronted with the question "Hey Al, if life is absurd then
why should we bother to live?" responded "yes, it is absurd, but we should
live as if it wasn't". PoMos don't even acknowledge this much. It's almost
as if they think time is put on hold for them to wander around in some
surrealist suspended animation.

The postmodernists seem to actually believe in absurdity and live it
daily. They perpetuate absurdity. They try to deal with the quantum
mechanics of life, but with no grounding in the knowledge of what they talk
about. Scientific principles work largely on a macroscopic level. On a
subatomic level, we really don't understand what is happening. Most of us
accept that and get on with life. Theories are great, but almost all PoMo
never gets out of the embryonic stage. Most in fact doesn't even start
developing before someone else comes up with the new flavour of the week.
It's fad-ism at best.

Postmodernists do the same thing to language/philosophy/art that
experimental physicists do with subatomic particles -- they come up with
imaginary vehicles and postulate endlessly with phrases and lingo that no
one but themselves (and that is even questionable most of the time)
understand or even cares to understand. This is what is so distasteful to
me about PoMo.

It is too experimental, almost to the point that NOTHING ever gets
accomplished. People like Judith Butler, who have renounced themselves to
spinning yarns of PoMo fancy are no more useful than the theoretical
physicists who spend a 40 year career studying imaginary particles and come
up with nothing. The amount of bogus documentation of ridiculous
experiments that we need to wade through in order to come up with anything
of value far outweighs the value of anything they have ever done. At least
in Physics, some things do actually get discovered.

I remember watching a Dutch Film (they are good for something) called "the
fourth man" in which the main character (a writer) told a tall tale to an
audience and then described how he 'lied the truth'". He went on to explain
that if we lie the truth enough, we begin to believe it for ourselves. PoMo
is suffering from the delusion that they are actually doing something of
note. They aren't. They are simply lying their own truth. It's
entertaining, but disturbing when you consider that people are actually
believing the truth that they lie. Before they have even understood this
truth that someone else has lied, they make up their own new truth. It's
the proverbial "Emperor's New Clothes". The trouble is, the clothes are
always new -- hence out of fashion in spite of themselves -- and there
really isn't an emperor with any stability.

[A. Jenn Sondheim]

I have no idea who wrote this or why, but I've taught postmodernism in
fact, and this account sounds ridiculous! For example - just look at
postmodern geography and its attention to specificity - in Sojas or Davis
or Harvey or any number of other researchers. And since "PoMo" or however
it's written isn't a coherent school, but in fact a tendency across a lot
of writers who would disagree with each other - I tend to be very
suspicious of any characterization that goes on about "pomos think this"
etc.

Alan

[TOM DILLINGHAM]

I agree with Alan. The PHIL-LIT list is a bunch of reactionary
soreheads, in my experience, and is moderated so as to prevent a
ny departure from the dogma that postmodern thought is as it
is described in that post. Of course the post is preposterous--
filled with the standard unsupported bitching and moaning,
stereotypes that are hackneyed even when they turn up in
journalistic (_TIME_) accounts of postmodernism, and really not
worth reading.
Tom Dillingham

[TMB]

It goes hand in hand with the level of thought/analysis that is involved
in thinking "postmodernism" as a general category, I think. Partly, "the
postmodernists" are to blame for that, perhaps. Myself, I'm against them!
;)

TMB