post modernism
Mar 23 2006 21:08
i'm doing an essay on postmodernism in uni, am i right in thinking that it is basically part of the campaign about the 'death of communism' after the collapse of the USSR, (i know it is a bit more complex than that but...)
It claerly is a bunch of bolloks, but if you have any proper criticisms i would like to hear them.
Mar 23 2006 21:23
#2
Hi Jaycee,
what you seem to have in mind is Francis Fukayama's 'end of history' thesis - that with the collapse of the berlin wall liberal capitalism has triumphed as the final social system. I haven't actually read it, but that seems a distinctly 'modern' idea (linear, newtonian, even marxian).
Postmodernism is v.diverse, and while a lot of it is bollocks, there are some very good ideas buried in the obscure jargon, e.g. Foucault's analysis of power and idea of biopower and about 2 or 3 concepts out of 1000 pages of Deleuze & Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Giorgio Agamben is also very interesting and is considered a post-mod, he's heavily influenced by Foucault. Another one I haven't read which is on the reading list on social science degrees everywhere is Homi Bahba's Nation as Narration, which again follows Foucault's work in his 1975/6 College de France lectures (published in english as Society Must Be Defended). Basically Foucault is worthwhile then 
A paper that's worth reading is Complexity Theory & the Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century - it's not radical but tries to define a framework between modernism & postmodernism.
Mar 23 2006 21:30
#3
Oh yeah and Wikipedia's article on postmodernism is a great place to start because you can just click on names and follow random paths (like a rhizome say deleuze & guattari ). I spend hours sucked into that bloody thing ...
My main problem with the postmodernists is that they often come off so bloody defeatist (though Foucault denies this and so does Baudrillard here, discussing The Matrix). They certainly offer far more anaylsis than suggestions for concrete action, though I quite like Deleuze & Guattari's idea that their books (specifically A Thousand Plateaus which has a high bollocks content) should be used as a toolbox to dip into rather than a manual, though only dogmatic marxists and religious fundos read that way anyway
Mar 23 2006 21:33
#4
Post modernism is simply an incredulity toward meta-narratives. Anarchism, excepting its essentialist humanism, has generally had this stance. Chomsky can piss off. He hates post-modernists because of their substantial critique of his linguistics; inborne grammar my ass....
Mar 23 2006 21:37
#5
revolutionrugger wrote:
Post modernism is simply an incredulity toward meta-narratives. Anarchism, excepting its essentialist humanism, has generally had this stance. Chomsky can piss off. He hates post-modernists because of their substantial critique of his linguistics; inborne grammar my ass....
nah he argues that the brain is wired in such a way that makes language possible and that this displays itself in universal traits of grammar.
Only a numpty would imagine something as universal as speech is the product of discourse and not millions of years of evolution.
Mar 23 2006 21:44
#6
revolutionrugger wrote:
Anarchism, excepting its essentialist humanism, has generally had this stance
have you read that Saul Newman paper 'Anarchism & the Politics of Ressentiment'? Quite good I thought though he does caricature "classical anarchism's" view of human essence - Malatesta, a contemporary of Kropotkin who he heavily quotes, said
Quote:
Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men must be changed, and to transform men, society must be changed.
- which kinda bollockses up his argument that classical anarchists saw an inherently good human essence opposed to (rather than interacting with or even constituting) the evil of the State. Nonetheless, loads of anarchos have a really defeated victim politics thing going on, theres defending the oppressed and then theres wallowing in it ...
Revol68 wrote:
Only a numpty would imagine something as universal as speech is the product of discourse and not millions of years of evolution.
yes but numpties abound in the acadamies of europe ... 
Mar 23 2006 21:53
#7
I've always been skeptical of Po-Mo, I guess I am pretty catholic as a Modernist. I think po-mo is just people writing about modernism, a lot of wasted trees, people trying to get heads or tails of it. I don't see any advance on Joyce in the literary realm, and I think the Sits are the last leap in critical theory.
Modernism I can sink my teeth into...as an outgrowth/response to the dislocation engendered by the industrial age. Further technological development extend that alienation even more but I think the mechanics are essentially the same.
But what do i know. Baudrillard bores me. Adorno I can't wade through, but probably should.
Mar 23 2006 22:03
#8
WillsWilde wrote:
I've always been skeptical of Po-Mo ... I think po-mo is just people writing about modernism
Yeah ...
Michel Foucault wrote:
I don't consider myself a postmodernist, i simply like to reassess what it means to be modern
So, a postmodernist then 
The funniest episode in pomo has to be The Sokal Affair Feckin hilarious.
Mar 23 2006 22:09
#9
Ha Ha.
Mar 24 2006 00:09
#10
i think postmodenism may be the most useless phrase in the history of human thought.
post? read The Wasteland and shut up.
ha... only being obstreporous, some stuff that falls under that heading is really good, but i think the word post-structuralist covers most of the good stuff, and 'postmodernism' allows lots of crap to sneak through.
generally though it's just critical reassessment of modernity, whether in haraway's attack on the assumptions of scientific research or foucault's general wonderfulness. though i'm not sure he would have defined himself as po-mo.
Mar 24 2006 00:12
#11
Foucault wavered between very strong structuralism and very Neiztchen post structuralism.
but yes ultimately he was a modernist, and reckonised so called post modernism as really modernity becoming much more self concious.
Mar 24 2006 00:14
#12
Hell, you folks make me wish i had gone to school. Can anyone reccomend some Foucault
for beginners? 
Mar 24 2006 00:15
#13
i think lyotard defined it as a strengthening in certain tendencies within modernity as well as the criticism thereof. that's why i think that the prefix post is spectacularly unhelpful. maybe ultra-modern?
Mar 24 2006 00:17
#14
madness and civilisation and discipline and punish are both readable enough. then there's lots of introducing foucault and foucault for beginners etc available
Mar 24 2006 00:19
#15
dara wrote:
post-structuralist covers most of the good stuff
agreed, and I'm reading Deleuze & Guattari at the moment, but they don't half talk a load of pretencious, obscurist, buggering-psuedoscientific becoming-wankery. They invent a new concept every three fucking lines and then go ahh, look, there are contradictions, what we need is a new concept, or even better an old one rehashed and reinterpretted in a different way. They seem to say 'Body without Organs' whenever they're not quite sure themselves what they're on about, it seems to have different meanings throughout. 'Ahh but we must move beyond biunivocal signifiers and signifieds to realise that there are polyvocal chains of signs arsing about and forming zones of becoming-intensity on the Body without Organs. Or something'. Its pissing me off frankly.
(and if you havn't read Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus then that probably makes even less sense. never mind hey, I had to get that off my chest)
Mar 24 2006 00:23
#16
Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
are those Foucault as well?
Mar 24 2006 00:26
#17
yeah I wouldn't even try and decipher Anti Opedius without some sort of grounding through an introductory text or secondary source. It would be like walking into the Amazon without a map!
Of course the Christopher Columbus of libcom (Jack) will soon appear and lambast everyone for the use of secondary sources.
He still reads the bible in latin btw!
Mar 24 2006 00:26
#18
WillsWilde wrote:
Can anyone reccomend some Foucaultfor beginners?
Society Must Be Defended is quite good ... its a transcipt of his lecture course to the College de France in 1975/6. It basically looks at the origin of 'the nation' and 'race struggle' (understood broadly to include struggles of actual 'races', gauls, franks etc, and also later classes etc). He invert's Clausewitz's famous proposition to argue "politics is war continued by other means". I thought it was quite accessible, was the first Foucault book I finished
And yeah Discipline and Punish is good but a little heavy and dry in places, and the penguin edition has tiny print which doesn't help matters.
EDIT:
WillsWilde wrote:
Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are those Foucault as well?
no, gilles deleuze & felix guattari, they're mad. literally. The first lines of A Thousand Plateaus are "we wrote Anti-Oedipus together, and as each of us was many, it was already quite a crowd". You can read the first few pages at amazon with the 'look inside' function ...
Mar 24 2006 00:31
#19
anti-oedipus and a thousand plateaus are by gilles deleuze and felix guattari, not foucault.
Mar 24 2006 00:36
#20
WillsWilde wrote:
Hell, you folks make me wish i had gone to school
lol I did a business degree 
Still schooling I guess, and no doubt Foucault would have something to say about it (in summary he sees institutions as prisons) ...
Mar 24 2006 00:44
#21
Thanks, I think I'ev got enough to chew on. Obviously I'm not really qualified to chat about post-modernism but the stuff that have read is fairly obscurantist, er, em, I like clarity and rigor. Plain words.
I see Oscar Wilde as an early exemplar of Modernist thought. I think Pynchon and Ishmael Reed are solid Modernist writers.
And i don't see Chomsky as a social democrat, just because he doesn't foam at the mouth, and has voted (tho i don't and won't.).
There's a neat clip in "Manufacturing Consent" where Foucault and Chomsky are at this forum, speaking in their native languages to each other (which I find stultifying) and Chomsky's advocating classical anarchist-federated-collective ideas. It's neat because it seems he would be more at ease discudsing these things in a European context than back in the States.
Mar 24 2006 00:51
#22
Joseph K. wrote:
A paper that's worth reading is Complexity Theory & the Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century - it's not radical but tries to define a framework between modernism & postmodernism.
Are you joking?
It reads like a bad copy of sokal.
You could summarise all of the sense that it contains into the short paragraph (which is pretty much all we can take from complex systems analysis into analysing society on a grand scale):
"society is complex and it is impossible to predict the outcome of policy changes accurately. The most we can do is to create forces and boundaries which push and restrain society in certain ways, although these are not guaranteed to work".
It makes me want to slap somebody with a fish.
Mar 24 2006 00:54
#23
what kind of fish?
Mar 24 2006 00:59
#24
gurrier wrote:
It makes me want to slap somebody with a fish.
lol. it does do the sokal 'grab some science and apply it to everything' trick but nonetheless it is a good point that linear causality was often an assumption of 'modernist' thought (or in reality, an assumption read in by dogmatic readers), Marx pretty much tried to do for society what newton did for physics, in a kuhnian paradigm sense those where the methodologies and 'right questions to ask' that defined 'modernism', and complexity has changed that, i.e. with game theory etc in economics stressing contingency and interconectedness (though, Marx did this too I suppose, crude readings are perhaps the 'modern' ones - i'm getting in a bit of a mess here ).
Yeah, basically it could have been reduced to a couple of pages, but it does address the ways in which the present ruling class (as do they all) places itself at the pinnacle of all posssibilities.
Mar 24 2006 01:01
#25
Quote:
kuhnian paradigm
please explain, if possible to do so with concision
and what does the colloquial 'lol' mean, is that a Britslang thing?
Mar 24 2006 06:35
#26
fuck sorry. in digging myself out of a hole i seem to have become a pretensious cock
Thomas Kuhn wrote a book in the 60s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he argued that scientific thought goes through 'paradigm shifts' which are sudden, dramatic changes in assumptions and valid methods whenever the contradictions in a given 'paradigm'/mindset/set of assumptions reach a critical mass, e.g. observations of subatomic particles not obeying Newton's laws mounted until Quantum theory revolutionised physics.
Apparantly it is abusing the term 'paradigm' to apply it to things other than science, but Foucault, appropriately for this thread, had a similar concept called an 'episteme', meaning the limits of acceptable questions for all knowledge accross society, e.g. Christian dogma was essential to medieval european thought and got people like Galilleo into lots of trouble for doing science that contrdicted the bible.
An example relevant for anarchists would be the way all political possibilities have to be expressed through political parties and the State in order not to be categorised as 'extremist' and excluded from public discourse i.e. the corporate press. You can have a minimal neoliberal State or a Keynesian Welfare State but a State you must have (undermining parliamentary democracy is one of the things British domestic intelligence service Mi5 (like a domestic CIA but theoretically without enforcement or investigatory powers) have in their mandate to prevent).
And 'lol' is netspeak for 'laughs out loud' ... obviously netspeak has regional dialects too
Mar 24 2006 07:12
#27
Intriguing. I'll check out the Kuhn if i can make time.
Wikipedia is damned useful and addictive too,
Mar 24 2006 08:14
#28
WillsWilde wrote:
Wikipedia is damned useful and addictive too,
Indeed. When I'm not wasting my bosses time on libcom I'm wasting my bosses time on wikipedia
Mar 24 2006 09:48
#29
by the way, 'lol' means 'laugh out loud'. it's pretty lame and i prefer saying hahahahahahahahahahahaha
but that's just me.
the Sokal Affair was pretty funny, except that i think it was a cultural geography journal, and i'm a cultural geographer, so that's also quite embarassing
i agree that the best postmodern stuff comes from the poststructuralists. they've got it going on. kuhn is nice, you know, he used to be a meteorologist...
check out complex systems theory. it's a sort of scientific version of the whole poststructuralist thing. check out Robert Geyer's stuff, especially http://www.liv.ac.uk/polcomm/staff_pages/r_geyer.htm
it's pretty much got all you need to know on complexity right there
Mar 24 2006 10:10
#30
This is a good essay on postmodernism:-
Quote:
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
Quote:
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don’t know anything about.
Also see the 'postmodernism generator' at http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo - a different random, nonsensical postmodernist essay every time you log on! 
good quote from chomsky on this, cant remember exactly. He says something like "it gives academics the chance to criticise, without getting involved in struggle, and appearing more radical than they really are."
Think it sums it up quite well.