What is *really* Postmodernism?

I've not studies postmodernism so here's a professor talking about postmodernists.
>youtube.com/watch?v=hP79SfCfRzo
>youtube.com/watch?v=LvAwoUvXNzU&index=8&list=PLA34681B9BE88F5AA&t=0s
>youtube.com/watch?v=Pt4W-sDK3nM
From what I understand, Postmodernists can be very different people and even people who reject the label. I honestly don't know, but I do know anyone who says shit like "oh so everything's as good as everything else", "it's secret marxism" or "postmodernism means nothing matters" are basically talking out their ass.

>this man is a pseud

Only according to raging /pol/acks and buttblasted commies. Notice how they only attack his definition of postmodernism.

There is no cohesive or coherent group of "postmodern" thinkers that accept and engage in labeling themselves as this. The works of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. are so different from each other that we can barely conceive of how could someone ever lump them together in a single unity, other than simply not ever reading any of the authors.

With this said, a lot of authors (not only the ones Peterson consider postmodern, and not only the ones I mentioned) came up and develop what they call a "postmodern condition" of the world, which is largely a description of our current state of affairs in the largely de-industrialized developed world (e.g architecture becomes chaotic, contradictions in language and media no longer carry shock value, economy is driven by finance and services/products are left in a second plane, social links become atomized and exchangeable, etc.). You could say that, in view of this, Peterson himself writes *about* postmodernism (as in, the condition and not some philosophical denotation) in his criticisms of his perceived views of it. Actually, think about it: why would you criticize an author that is merely embodying the "spirit" of his times and not the times themselves? Why would Peterson address postmodernists as guilty of spreading something that they contracted by external means to begin with? I find it really odd when people say philosopher X was responsible for Y, this is hardly ever the case: it's much more likely that a philosopher only describes what already is an ongoing trend of his current society.

Lastly but not last, there is a really good lecture by Rick Roderick on all things postmodern, where he also addresses the most common criticism (that Peterson sometimes also tries to employ sometimes), that is, the claim that there is, or there was ever any truly relativist philosopher: youtube.com/watch?v=LvAwoUvXNzU&list=PLA34681B9BE88F5AA&index=7

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Postmodernism is when you hate God and hierarchy and whatever.

>Notice how they only attack his definition of postmodernism.
Peterson always rails against the 'postmodern neomarxist types' without even a elementary understanding of the subjects, obviously people are going to attack this as it's one of his most frequent points when he's dealing with leftist philosophy. His arguments against Marxism are equally preposterous.

I derped hard with the repeating words there. Regardless, I want to add that I don't think Peterson is a full blown pseud. The problem IMO is that the whole being-a-professor thing can at times get to one's head, and then one starts trying to tackle things that are way out of one's league, without the much needed time for introspection. The more time passes, the more Peterson will sound like an old man going on and on about younger folks, because he doesn't seem to be sitting down to actually think about the underlying premises of the works he criticizes. Such premises can be something he either agrees or disagrees with, but they are much deeper than supposed claims of relativism or supposed desires to shape society into meaninglessness. Rather, most authors he dismisses so quickly actually made resounding questions about how we see deal with each other and how we deal with the world when the world is in such a profound state of atomization as it is today. Questions that he should be tackling himself head on more often, instead of tackling previous answers and "correcting" them.

the idea of "postmodernity" only makes sense when you consider the fact that in the 70s-90s people believed we were coming to the end of history. everything that was going to happen was the modern era, and we're just living in the aftermath of the failures and successes of the modern era.

when lyotard wrote his book on postmodernism, the idea was that the modern era's consequence was essentially to destroy the teleology that prefigured WW2. nazism, liberalism, marxism, science, history etc. rely on the idea that the text can make coherent the past and turn it into a narrative of some sort -- the idea of progress, material dialectics, or the destiny of a nation.

now we exist in an era where things dont cohere into a single ideal but rather smaller narratives compete with each other, which results in a kind of performative aspect to information. its in this context that derrida, lyotard, baudrillard, etc. wrote their works. the postmodernists criticized this state of affairs, they did not welcome it.

jordan peterson is just looking for an easy scapegoat because his worldview doesnt make sense without a grand narrative about Western Civilization's Subverted Potential. he believes that the failure of the grand narrative wasnt intrinsic to it, but rather the result of Nazis, Commies, etc. subverting its values. this is why he needs SJWs, feminists, postmodern neo-marxists, etc. -- without them he'd have to ask his audience whether it was the very ideas he's defending that led to the society he's decrying, and that would make them unhappy.

A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Zizek and Harris. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Idealistic in the large sense. Slightly bogus.

>I forgot to ask something else. Where did Jordan take the concept of "Undermining the individual and promoting a narrative in which the oppressed collectives and the oppressor can only fight each other because of power structures" from? If I recall, that was his definition of Postmodernism.

the bible

basically means a paradigm of modernity has been surpassed.

Different people tend to have different understandings of it. An architects definition of postmodern will probably differ from a literature student's definition. There's probably been several attempts at defining it ITT, but I'mnot going to bother reading the thread.

Bottom-line is that if an author hasn't explained what paradigm of modernity has been surpassed, and uses the term as if it has inherent meaning, then they're not worth reading

is literary postmodernism related to philosophical postmodernism in more than time period?

yes in the sense that literary postmodernism also responds to the assumptions of modernism. but literary postmodernism is a lot more about building on the works of modernist writers, Ulysses after all is basically the blueprint for every big postmodernist novel a la pynchon/gass/dfw. philosophical postmodernism seeks to reject certain modernist propositions instead.

How related would you say they are in their philosophies though? I don't read a lot of philosophy myself yet and i'm asking for a friend...

ulysses isn't a postmodern novel. its an example of high-modernism, you faglord

I hate when I do this

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idk how meaningful it is to say they are related. i mean they were both influenced by the same events in history and time & place so of course theyll be tightly connected to each other.

as an example, i dunno if pynchon read a lot of philosophy. but his novels prefigure a lot of things that lyotard talked about more than 10 years later.

(you)

All you need to know is that it's as stupid and nonsensical as it sounds

thanks for the reply. It'd just be kind of funny, given good novels espouse philosophy of their own to say something different from the philosophical contemporary and still share the same moniker and it's something that's stuck with me ever since learning how drawn out the Enlightenment was...

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Read Bauman

How is he wrong in their philosophies and arguments? "B-but that's not true postmodernism" isn't a valid argument.

>isn't a valid argument

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Postmodernism can refer either to postmodernism, the movement in the arts, or postmodernism as a philosophy. The two influence each other and refer generally to a set of beliefs. Like any artistic movement or philosophy trying to boil it down to a slogan or pin it to a concrete time frame or group of thinkers / artists will miss the nuance of the what postmodernism is, or more accurately, the many ways it has been defined or can be defined.

It would make most sense to put really at the end of the sentence. Putting it before is would be acceptable but still sounds awkward.

Faith in God for the greater good.
Then we had faith in science, technology to be the solution to our troubled existence.
Now, postmodernism, we have no faith in anything. Which makes for a world without truth, where, whatever you say, is only gibberish meant to create the illusion of good for your own selfish goals.

Basically it is a existential crisis, predicted by Nietcsche and Jung.
We don't know wtf we are supposed to do anymore.

>postmodernism, we have no faith in anything
lol wrong

I totally agree with you, the intrinsic idea exposed is brilliant, the possible options in the development of the subject are endless, the clarity of the argument is capital, I have rarely had occasion to read such a pleasant subject, with the right length, with the adequate metric, no frills. Quevedo already said: The good thing if brief twice good

What are some worthy thinkers who responded, or challenged, postmodernism?

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Bump

All of the folk heros. Uncle Ted, Titanium Tim, Killdozer, IRS plane guy, Dorner, barrel roll guy

Meant to quote

cringe

you're in for a rough few decades, pussy

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It's questioning the certainty of modernism.

they try to keep it vague cause they know theyd get blown the fuck out in a heartbeat if they let themselves be labeled

>lmao "secret marxism"
if pomo intellectuals preach that pomo is agnostic to political (or even economic) spectrum, pomo intellectuals should be in theory also randomly and evenly spread across conservative, progressive, left and right flavours of political spectra.
The reality of practically every pomo thinker ever around being tightly clustered to the left political leaning tells a wholy different story

serious question:

what is modernity/modernism and how did it differ from what came before it?

is it capitalism? industrialisation?, strem-of-consciousness writing in literature? mass-production?, the general movement of populations from rural to metropolitan cities? the creation of the human subject as an object of study? the development of scientific discourse?

help

Peterson, Jordan. dislike him.

imagine being an a*glo

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You could probably peg it to industrialism. There are I'm sure dozens of theses in this that all vehemently contradict each other with specific thinkers and writers but the simple version is again you could probably peg it to industrialism.

sorry, I didn't exactley mean "what caused" modernity/modernism....I meant "what is it?".
I should have been clearer

I mean . . . it literally is a valid argument.
If he's produced a definition to argue against that is, in fact, not postmodernism, than that line of argumentation is completely superfluous.

The problem is I don't see a single cohesive definition of postmodernism in this thread or anywhere for that matter.
The people calling him a pseud for arguing against a strawman out themselves as being just as full of shit when they can't produce WHY his definition doesn't work.
Ironically, I think that is the logical end of what I understand postmodernism to encourage.

Post modernism is the rejection of a grand narrative, like that faith in the right God will lead you down the one true path, or that science will bring us a utopia of wonder and joy, or that your Nation is the end of all ends and everything else is just there to propel it. A modernist thinks there must be a satisfying ending to our story and a righteous path to tread.

no clue who this pseud is
however, post-modernism is basically how jews feel after Christmas (modernity): ran down stairs, no fat man with presents, tear the whole shit up and try to figure out how to go on while inevitably going on

I'm not that guy, but in a certain sense, industrialism "is" the common concept that underlies the (very, very) different modernist trends that arose in the late 19th and 20th century.

Basically, modernism was a response to the inertia of the 18th century. I can only give the example I directly know about from studying: in the 18th century, it was thought that knowledge about physics was nearing completion and that we knew everything "there was to know"; all that remained was categorizing and solving our most fundamental equations for the case of every possible known system. Doesn't have to be said that this didn't last very long, with the end of the 19th century seeing the likes of James Clerk Maxwell find out that light acted like a wave, only for early 20th century physicists to demonstrate it could just as well act like a particle. Max Planck being forced to adapt fundamental assumptions about nature because of massive disagreements inbetween theory and experiment for the case of black blody radiation, Einstein's special relativity, etc etc. In every possible field of physics, the 20th century saw the systematic failure of previous hypotheses to predict all the exciting new phenomena that were being brought upon and by, and reinforcing, the progress of techniques in industrialization.

This kind of deconstructionist (not the Derrida kind of it...) tendency happened all over the 20th century society (the industrial revolution and its own subsequent revolution in the form of Fordism, for example), culminating with the two world wars and the cold war that followed. Ultimately, the state of modernism and modernity is, in hindsight, defined by the conflict among the ideologies of fascism, communism and capitalism. No need to say who came out the victor, and effectively "surpassed" the need to oppose 18th century tradition and technique. Capital today is not a single coherent ideology but an amalgamate of different thoughts that compete for micromanaging of resources (that can range from actual material resources to people in themselves), and this is why it's called a "postmodern" condition, because it doesn't seek to break with the 18th century "static" beliefs but rather fully engage in a dynamic and complex system of interweaving ideas.

Funny that most "postmodernists" actually criticize this state of affairs. No one thinker really likes this condition much, not even the ones Peterson credit as promoting it.

>the color of paint on a house
This definitely says a lot about the society we live in

>out themselves as being just as full of shit when they can't produce WHY his definition doesn't work.

wow... genius rhetorician here

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bam

Post-modernism is often used as a catch-all term for a certain kind of academic thinking, but that's not quite the case. I think in order to critique it you have to elaborate specifically what the hell it is you're talking about. Post-modern philosophy is not post-modern literature. Post-modern theology is not post-modern art. Though there are intersections they tread very different epistemological grounds.

Literary post-modernism came about in the 50s and 60s, which focused on reducing the scope of the reader's awareness of the world beyond the text. Stories lose the need for narrators, dialogue loses the need for the 'he said' 'she said' variations. Also has a taste for the trappings of nostalgia and the way the past returns to infringe on the present. Often results in convoluted and disorientating reading experiences. DFW is often heralded as a great post-modern author but in truth the genre was already in its dying gasps by that point.

post-modern philosophy can refer to two (or more) separate branches of thought: Deleuze's metaphysics of difference, ideas of deterritorialisation, desiring production, etc.; and Baudrillard's critique of the logic of neoliberalism/'late stage' capitalism. Important to bear in mind that these thinkers are not easily reconcilable, though they both have much to say on the subject.

post-modern theology is a belief system which adopts the death of god as an integral and constitutive part of what God should be– the son and (by extension) the father die so his truth can be carried on by the community of believers (holy spirit).

((postmodernists and neomarxists))) is code for the elite. They're the same as the globalists Alex Jones talks about.
Not necessarily jews.

so basically successful people that you don't like?

More like badly intentioned successful people. Does not account for the conservative side of the spectrum.

>(Kek)

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what if the real postmodernism was the friends we made along the way?

Post-modernism is best understood as a rhetorical strategy of intellectuals and academics on the far left of the political spectrum developed in reaction to the failure of socialism and communism.

Basically reality didn't suit their politics so reality had to go.

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>Picard settled back to await the Star Trek(R): Into Darkness(TM) (2013)

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this website is full of slavs, iberians, sudacas, random fucking asian people and all others sorts, I have accidentally phrased my sentences that way (or asked "how is x called?") because it is so prevalent. it was much worse on krautchan. it is just that thing where you accidentally mimic accents if you are around them enough.