It's like calling Joe Biden a communist or Obama a muslim atheist. The point isn't that the description is consistent with itself, let alone with reality. The point is that it has the words you hate because the person is bad.
i so wish there was an actually organized popular left
movement in teh us of a like back in the days of mother jones, popular
anarchist groups etc where they were getting things done like unions
demanding 2 days off per week etc : give them a proper active real
“postmodern neo-marxsit” movement that got traction so they stop being
so alienated and get in touch with reality for a change. no more
strawmen for them , give them the real deal. Actually republicans could
help , in their first version they were all about “The dignity of labor
consisted in the opportunity to rise above wage-earning status to work
for oneself.”… modify this slightly to fit our current ecological
collapse-neoliberal global economy by helping that kind of work to be
sustainable, participative, decentralized.
Well, I’m a postmodernist democratic socialist, at least.
My lame alt-right brother (thankfully, I have another, much cooler
one) was so legitimately shocked when I told him that I was, in fact, a
post-modernist, like he couldn’t believe that anyone would actually
accept that label. It was like I’d admitted to killing kittens or
something. It, along with him actually enjoying my books, has forced
something of a small crisis of faith in him as he’s finally realized
that he actually doesn’t know what the hell postmodernism is. It’s been
very satisfying and amusing to watch.
I mean, if you treat postmodernism as a looser, more correlative category- a best-fit, degree of similarity sort of thing- rather than as a stricter taxonomic category, it starts getting a lot easier to define. If it quacks like a duck, shares a deep distrust of grand systems and theories, and indulges in one of the intellectual traditions under the postmodern umbrella, then it's, uh... probably a postmodernist taking a bath, I guess?
The analogy probably would have worked better without the quacking, but "quacks like a duck" is th traditional idiom.
Yeah, it kind of works as a loosey-goosey "Kinda sorta like this" or even a kind of intellectual-web kinda "People like these who were influenced by these guys" (but then those two don't neccessarily end up being the same either...)
Of course, confusing things is that post-modernism is both a literary, political-sociological, and epistemological category and while linked they aren't neccessarily the same thing.
It's like "feudalism" in that it's term that is kinda-sorta useful but also kinda-sorta falls apart once you start looking at it and you end up with "The only postmodernist is this one guy" and "feudalism only existed in this one village in france for half a decade".
Yeah, exactly.
It gets so messy in practice (for both feudalism and postmodernism) that making blanket statements about either (or inventing rigid diagnostic criteria for them) really is a lost cause.
Like, the arguments between postmodernists and scientists in the 90s are famous, many people labeled postmodernism as anti-science, and yet I came to postmodernism THROUGH science- I found it to be the region of philosophy most commensurate with my understanding of science. I studied geology in university, am strongly committed to empiricism, and have a lifelong interest in the other Earth and biological sciences- all of which are deeply messy, empirical practices, to which elegant grand theories lend themselves poorly. (Plate tectonics, natural selection, and the like are incredibly powerful, but they're not elegant at all- they're super messy and weird emergent properties in practice. There is no essential tectonic or evolutionary force as anything other than abstraction- in practice, they're entirely contingent, non-inevitable processes rising from numerous real forces interacting.) I take comfort in the messiness of the real world, and deeply distrust elegant hypotheses. (Which is a huge part of why I turned so hard against the Rationalists after a brief flirtation with their ideas- but then, empiricists and rationalists have fought the same damn fight over and over for centuries. The empiricists always win in the end, but the rationalists always rebirth themselves in some new form, denying their connection to the mistakes of their predecessors. For all they might deny it, the sin of the Rationalists is absolutely a close cousin of the intellectual sins of Le Corbusier, Lysenko, and the Austrian school of economics. Going off on a tangent, though.)
Talk to any other self-proclaimed postmodernist, and I bet you'll get a wild range of similarly weird, random origin stories. (Well, there might be a little more homogeny among some philosophy students, dunno.) Trying to force postmodernism (or feudalism) into legibility is a lost cause.
Yeah, which is at the start of your paper you have to spend a couple of pages with "I know these terms can mean many things but for the purpose of this paper postmodernism means..."
“Postmodernism is when you use gender-neutral pronouns and the more gender-neutral the pronouns the more postmodern it is.” -Carl Robinette Marks
This but without the “post” and “neo.”
no
I do not “think”
My favorite part of this amazing description is that tankies are so anti-pomo, they call Foucault a CIA mole and such.
i so wish there was an actually organized popular left movement in teh us of a like back in the days of mother jones, popular anarchist groups etc where they were getting things done like unions demanding 2 days off per week etc : give them a proper active real “postmodern neo-marxsit” movement that got traction so they stop being so alienated and get in touch with reality for a change. no more strawmen for them , give them the real deal. Actually republicans could help , in their first version they were all about “The dignity of labor consisted in the opportunity to rise above wage-earning status to work for oneself.”… modify this slightly to fit our current ecological collapse-neoliberal global economy by helping that kind of work to be sustainable, participative, decentralized.
Feeling like a pre-modern paleo-marxist today
I try not to think it lest I say it outside the inner circle meetings
Cultural bolshevi-I mean Marxism!
only a cultural neo-marxist, sadly
“I am the very model of a modern Marxist post neo”
i always think this, regardless of what is currently happening
Well, I’m a postmodernist democratic socialist, at least.
My lame alt-right brother (thankfully, I have another, much cooler one) was so legitimately shocked when I told him that I was, in fact, a post-modernist, like he couldn’t believe that anyone would actually accept that label. It was like I’d admitted to killing kittens or something. It, along with him actually enjoying my books, has forced something of a small crisis of faith in him as he’s finally realized that he actually doesn’t know what the hell postmodernism is. It’s been very satisfying and amusing to watch.
No, I’m normal
no because i’m not post-modern.
No