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Mad Science: Postmodernism - your views?

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      CommentAuthorCharlene
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.1)
    I've been reading about postmodernism recently and at times I've had my thoughts diverted to Doktor Sleepless or Planetary so I thought I'd bring this up here to hear everyone's thoughts on postmodernism in general (or with regards to whatever 'field' you might work in). Where do you lie in the modern-postmodern-post-postmodern spectrum and why?

    I'm new to it but my initial thoughts are that postmodernism is a bit too extreme with regards to its anti-science stance and about the idea that there is no truth and nothing essential about human beings. But I'd love to hear what people think.
    • CommentAuthorOddcult
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.2)
    The Internet has pretty much made it irrelvant as it's not really post anything that's online and used regularly all over the planet these days.
  3.  (4139.3)
    I don't associate postmodernism with the death of truth (which I associate more with poststructuralism), so much as the death of certainty. Questioning the discourse would seem to me to be all about finding the truth in the cultural strata. People will of course argue that truth is overturned or otherwise has no place in postmodernism, but that doesn't explain the postmodern obsession with authenticity:

    Authenticity refers to the truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, devotion, and intentions.


    But then, Rian Hughes always calls me The Last Modernist, so clearly I know nothing.
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      CommentAuthorallana
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.4)
    all i know is that Jurgen Habermas makes me giggle.
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      CommentAuthorJon Wake
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.5)
    Postmodernism, like most other philosophic movements, is a useful tool that, at the end of the day, contributes very little to life. As such its championed by critics, manipulated by artists, and ignored by the other 95% of humanity.
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      CommentAuthorliquidcow
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.6)
    I think a lot of people don't have a clue what post-modernism actually refers to, which is incredibly ironic when you think about it.

    The way I understand it, it relates to the death of the 'grand narrative'. As in, people used to believe in big all-encompassing ideas but now we all have our own smaller 'narratives', hence the rise in single-issue political campaigners. My personal favourite example is pop music. We used to have the charts and the top 40 and all that, and songs that would be at number 1 for weeks on end. But music has diversified so much that more and more we're all listening to completely different music. The charts don't represent what the majority of people are listening to anymore, they just show what particular thing has sold more than anything else, which isn't the same thing at all. Nothing is number 1 for longer than a week anymore because we never unite in our tastes long enough (or at all even) for that to happen. So the 'mainstream' becomes increasingly irrelevant as there are fewer people to hold it together and it has less and less relevance to what people actually think. And hence Top Of The Pops becomes a victim of post-modernism.

    In a purely informational context I guess what that means is that we're reaching a point where there is so much information out there that it becomes less and less possible for there to be an authoritative voice on anything, or to say anything truly new. So, yeh, it's death of certainty rather than death of truth. Almost like approaching, but never quite reaching, something like the Library Of Babel in Jorge Luis Borges' story.
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      CommentAuthoroutlawpoet
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.7)
    I would agree that Mr. Ellis' work is largely Modernist, and incompatible with postmodern sensibilities. Regardless of how cyberpunky, how doomed, how insane his characters and plots, there is always the bedrock of belief that a person can shape and change the world around them in accordance with their better desires in an understandable way. This is the conditio sine qua non of Modernism.

    Of course, he is not remotely the only, and won't be the last.
    • CommentAuthorIdiot
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008 edited
     (4139.8)
    The way I understand it, it relates to the death of the 'grand narrative'.

    That would be Lyotard's definition of it. Jameson defined it as a lack of depth - where culture has become all surface, image without meaning. Others have their own definitions. Most postmodern philosophers spent their careers arguing that they weren't postmodernists.

    The biggest thing I ever took away from postmodernism is its need for relativism - a lock of universal truths. Which is probably why there's about as many definitions of postmodernism as there are postmodernists.
  9.  (4139.9)
    To be very brief: while I can see where it's coming from philosophically, in my observation postmodernism has mostly produced increasingly elaborate justifications for doing nothing.
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      CommentAuthorCharlene
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.10)
    Thanks for everyones replies.

    When I've been reading about it, it's been the kinda thing where I felt I disagreed with what was being said but wasn't sure why. A big problem I think is that it all seems so vague, and you have to cut through a lot of jibberish to get to what postmodernism is actually about. And as someone else pointed out - many so-called postmodernists have spent their lives arguing that they are not in fact postmodernists. For some reason even the word "postmodernism" annoys me.

    I read a line in a blurb about postmodernism that said "We have come to a time where the future as it was predicted hasn't happened". Now, that immediately made me think of Doktor Sleepless and the whole "where's my fucking jetpack?" thing. Did they (we?) really not get the future they were promised? They don't have jetpacks but... jesus, look at the technology...

    I found a "postmodernism in a nutshell" on t'internet and it said this:

    (1) There is no objective truth or reality
    therefore => (2)
    (2) reality is constructed
    therefore => (3)
    (3) all comprehensible worldviews are oppressive
    therefore => (4)
    (4) such worldviews should be deconstructed
    therefore => (5)
    (5) Deconstructionism is the progressive pulverization of reality
    therefore => (1)

    The Sokal Affair made me giggle.
  11.  (4139.11)
    From a purely literary perspective, I find postmodernism amazing because of the looping mind-blowing plots, characters, and concepts that arise from it. Borges is a great example. Unfortunately I haven't gotten a hold of much by him, but his talk of infinite libraries, books that always open to different pages and other such crazy devices are always intriguing.

    Part of the attraction I think is that it reduces much of reality to a vast and complex mind game. And hey, games are fun, right? I'm sure quite a few postmodernists write the way they do because they just love picking bits of the world apart.

    It's kind of like fractals, if you've heard of them. You take a section of the design and zoom in and you have the design. You zoom in on another place, and you have the design appears again. It repeats infinitely. Postmodernists seem to zoom in on the chaotic ever-expanding detail. The difference for them is that there is no overarching pattern, no overarching certainty of the universe.
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      CommentAuthormister hex
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.12)
    I love postmodernism. I just can't fooking spell it, me.
    • CommentAuthorsacredchao
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.13)
    In art, especially film, it seems to me unavoidable. The constant genre blending (ala the Coens) and self-reflexiveness found in many many movies is one example.

    Also, I think Situationism is a very interesting blend of postmodernism and existentialism that appeals a lot to my sensibilities.
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      CommentAuthorallana
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2008
     (4139.14)
    there's a quote from a Cormac McCarthy book, i think it was No Country For Old Men, which i jotted down a long time ago. in my mind it made sense to think of it in terms of a modernism/postmodernism debate, but it may be just me:

    "the stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. as the sayin goes. which i reckon some would take as meaning that the truth cant compete. but i dont believe that. i think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. it dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. you cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. you cant corrupt it because that's what it is. it's the thing you're talkin about. i've heard it compared to the rock - maybe in the bible - and i wouldnt disagree with that. but it'll be here even when the rock is gone. i'm sure they's people would disagree with that. quite a few, in fact. but i never could figure out what any of them did believe."


    @DavidForbes, agreed. it's fascinating as a theoretical debate but almost useless in application. unless you are the aforementioned Jurgen Habermas and can make tons of money selling books about said debate.
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      CommentAuthorCharlene
    • CommentTimeNov 13th 2008
     (4139.15)
    it's its use in application that i've been pondering. i asked a lecturer about it and he said that there are 2 strands of postmodernism - the destructionist stuff (that's mostly been talked about here) and then there's hermeneutics. he reckons its the hermeneutics that we can learn from (in computer science anyway).
  16.  (4139.16)
    I'm not at all tracking with a lot of definitions of postmodernism here. From my view (slightly cribbed from a recent lit. class), modernism was about scrapping the old and creating something wholly new, whereas postmodernism has been about mining the old to cobble together something interesting. Re-examining and re-purposing, versus trying to generate something completely original. Andy Warhol painting Campbell's soup cans, versus Picasso creating Cubism.

    Planetary and Kill Bill exemplify postmodernism to me.
    • CommentAuthormlpeters
    • CommentTimeNov 13th 2008 edited
     (4139.17)
    I think labels like "Modernism" or "Postmodernism" are toys for critics to play with.

    I've heard Neil Gaiman referred to as "Postmodern" when to me he seems less a Postmodernist, than an updated Romantic. I guess it depends on perspective.

    @Warren
    "I don't associate postmodernism with the death of truth (which I associate more with poststructuralism), so much as the death of certainty. Questioning the discourse would seem to me to be all about finding the truth in the cultural strata..."

    Yeah, I'd go with that definition, if forced. I'd rather ask interesting questions or suggest implications than give answers that I'm not sure are there to give -- does that make me a "Postmodernist"? I dunno.
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      CommentAuthorliquidcow
    • CommentTimeNov 14th 2008
     (4139.18)
    This sums up postmodernism in a broad sense quite well: http://www.catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=677
  19.  (4139.19)
    I'm fond of the conjecture that Postmodernism is a sort of transtition phase between two periods of Modernism.

    It's not my idea but it works for me as an informal hypothesis; Modernism was a response to and, later a driving force behind, Modernity and particularly the fruits of Industry/Technology but the manifestation of the promise of Modernity, the great reification, was the two largest and ugliest wars in the history of civilisation. Nazi Germany was a modernist project par excellence; the architecture, the eugenic thousand year plan, the future-oriented mythologising of the world and the nation's role in it. Once Germany loses the war and exposes itself as being not just unpleasantly aggressive but actively evil (talking then, not now of course). Between that and the fact that everybody's broke, the heart goes out of the Modernist project and by the sixties you've got people like Ballard writing books like High-Rise which, when you think about it, about a run-of-the-mill piece of Modernist architecture leading to social breakdown within its own boundaries. That certainly counts as a death of certainty, I think. When you can't trust an artefact that was designed to be a step toard utopia.

    Paul Laffoley characterises the next phase of Modernism as the Bauhauroque, combining the modernist impluse of the Bauhaus school of design with the stylist extravagence (decadence?) of the Baroque period. And yes, I know he's a space-case but he's a very learned one.
  20.  (4139.20)
    I'd like to think we're in the end days of postmodernism, to be honest.

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