What is Postmodernism?

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Ouch!...
Armoured skeptic coped a bit of a bruising...

Dr.Layman was a good find...
I have subscribed to his channel...

Jordan Peterson needs postmodernism as a scapegoat like a jealous husband needs a cheating wife, or the nazis needed the Jews.
I love that zizek told him that to his face.

Peterson should however engage with postmodernism a bit more, maybe he'd realize that he himself is one of them.
Let me explain.

The whole 'any interpretation is as good as any other' isn't something the postmodernists actually proclaimed. Derrida just wrote about how no interpretation of a text is ever final.
If there was a final interpretation, why the hell would a 21st century psychologist take the 19th century framework of analytical psychology, mix in some behaviourism, genetics, lobsters etc. To interpret texts from 3000 BCE (The Horus myth)?
The answer is because our frameworks themselves develop, and we only ever use what is available to re-read texts.

We could try to reread the horus myth in the way the ancient egyptians did... But how would we do that?
We could take 19th century sociologist and anthropologist frameworks and declare it some primitive superstition.
We could take 20th century structuralism and read it as a functional text that serves to de- and prescribe social order.
Or we could look at how power relations are justified through 'divine origin'.
Why don't we just take the text literally? Because we don't believe in Horus.
It's just a myth.
It served all sorts of purposes. It's quite entertaining, so why don't we read it as a piece of comedic literature?
There's a graphic novel of it, it's hilarious (particularly the sex scene between the undead Osiris, a golden dildo which through magic becomes his penis, and his wife, who's still in the shape of a falcon. That's where Horus got his falcon-head).

Peterson's approach to interpretation is rather muddled. He doesn't really declare his framework.
Or as Sam Harris called: it's sophistry.

But there's more to postmodernism:
Baudrillard wrote that reality had ended.
That's quite a provocative statement. What he meant however was that by the 70s, it had become clear to everyone that there's more than one valid way to interpret the world, that the terms we use to describe it are fluid and fuzzy, and once we realized that, and look back, we see that people only ever told themselves stories about the world, which they called reality.

So here's the thing: if it isn't physics, it's poetry.
Poetry that structures our world, our societies, our gender relations.

Peterson knows this. But he needs an enemy for his story to function.

There's a nice video on how Peterson agrees in very, very fundamental ways with one of his arch enemies, Judith Butler:


Particularly when it comes to gender relations, Peterson invokes biological essentialism (women are like this, men like that).
But if we're all just biology, there's no free will, and people do what their body makes them do anyway. If we're not just biology, then there's a social construct on top of that biology. The question is, is this construct necessarily the way it is? So it's predetermined by biology, and not social at all?
Or is it social, and shaped by, say, economics?
The stay-at-home mom who takes care of the children was a uniquely white middle class invention. In the working class, women needed to work.
When Peterson says that women's right to work hasn't done them much good, he's agreeing with Germaine Greer, a radical feminist! They both agree that men and women are both subjected to the (labour-)market now, to economics.


Personally, I don't like the term postmodernism, and prefer Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity.
Solid modernity is when solid, definite knowledge (dogma, one might say) began to dissolve.
But at some point, everything became fluid, and now, we're in a state where nothing solid can form anymore.

In tradition, art and culture confirmed dogma.
In solid modernity, art and culture helped to dissolve dogmas.
In liquid modernity, art and culture are agents of creating desires, and everything - values, social structures etc. - is subject to flows.

Imagine a world governed by superior A.I.
It decides who you marry, what you study, if you get a divorce etc.
Now imagine that A.I. had two settings: one to aim for optimal human flourishing and one for optimal economics.
Do you think they are the same?
Bauman basically says, we built an imperfect system, aimed at economic flourishing.
It's not an A.I. - it's just the operating system we live on.

If you don't have time for postmodernism, you're basically saying you don't have time for the history of ideas that got us to where we think we are.

I think the sad thing there - it's probably true that his attacks on it are misplaced or ham-handed, but at the same time the people who do what he says they're doing with it are quite real and not only too common but they apparently haven't met against an intolerant rebellion of people who know postmodernism correctly who call BS on what they're doing, thus it lends the impression that postmodernism tolerantly protects such activity in the way that it often looks like Islam protects terrorism.

It doesn't bother me much on this because we didn't wade into it much.

Where it did bother me a little was on another thread when you started saying that the difference between us is I'm 'taking part' in some melee while you've extracted yourself. I never got an explanation of what that meant and it seemed like, out of politeness, we narrowly missed going somewhere genuinely useful.

You're right. And as with Islam, the rejection of the SJW needs to come from within academia. Postmodernists however are rather reflective people - Derrida is credited with introducing the term 'aporia' into the discourse, which means a kind of intellectual helplessness.
After all, if you're only ever interpreting a text through a certain framework, which is contingent on time and language and circumstances .... How can you ever think you're 'right'....
Foucault was more aggressive, but still.

But they did point to a serious problem: that we make everything up. Our societies, our genders, human rights etc. etc.
It's not that there is no biological basis for all thst, but there are no necessary reasons for why things are structured the way they are.
It's all contingent.

Mmmm...

I might say instead there's no necessary reason for the exact structure we have, there are natural and seemingly reflexive laws (ie. just the very ongoing social interaction and negotiation of different actors with different strengths and weaknesses) which force some kind of acknowledged hierarchy. There's ample room to criticize malpractice and abuse in hierarchy, that's critical.

As for greater dismemberment of hierarchy I can only think of one way that could be accomplished - ie. such a thorough development of AI that any human talent, whatsoever, becomes redundant and equally unneeded. That comes with it's own problems as well, such as - we're wired to grade genes on a bell-curve and elevate a certain small percent while trampling a greater percent at the bottom, we'd need to also do things like dismember sexual involvement, do odd things like illegalize sex with actual humans, we all end up banging robot surrogates who transfer sperm around, all such decisions are made by hyperintelligent AI built to both keep the gene pool variety robust and to filter out what can be seen as genetic diseases before such sperm ever meet an egg, ie. we'd need to essentially dissociate human interaction to a much greater degree and have it be something a lot closer to a life-long Catholic school complete with uniforms, girls on this side boys on that side, it has all the makings of great 20th century science fiction or something along those lines.

In a strange way, when I was still picking through the Seth books, I was reading Oversoul Seven and in there there was a bit about a projected future and there was something a bit squirly like this - ie. all races had been mixed out of existence (no races = no racism), men were homemakers while women were diplomats (I really don't think a matriarchy would be any better than a patriarchy, it would just create different problems and different forms of barbarism), and it was the sort of nauseating tedium that the protagonist, on his spacestation, decided to escape to earth to get away from. What I worry about with any of these 'hammer humanity until there's not enough asymmetry to fight over' approaches - I can only imagine just how many ugly problems would be set up for us to face just in terms of the value of being alive under such circumstances. Maybe it will be the case that the whole future of our race will be a game of constant trade-offs for which miseries we're willing to deal with as a price for removing others.

What I meant is: theres reasons for why things are the way they are. Things happened to end up this way and certain parts of it are good for some, some are bad for some others, and most are just there and accepted as fate by most people.
But there's no need for things to stay like that.
The same vague description could have been given for the french monarchy or slavery.
And then technology, human ideas and time changed things, and I guess most would argue: for the better.
But inbetween there were two world wars and a lot of local wars.

What you describe as the future - balancing trade-offs - sounds a lot like both present and past.
There's no reason to assume matriarchy is any better, but there's the other thing that the homo economicus is genderless.

Anyone can be a ruthlessly efficient functional psychopath as required by the system, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex or gender.
That's the equality we have today.
That's our freedom.

I think that's just a shifting of content within the same rules with some slight variations where you can get a little bit of elasticity for slightly different peaks. This is part of why for the most part I spend a lot more time looking at fundamental rules, and get more excited about new insights I can find into them, than worrying about particulars. Particulars are interesting if and when they show a novelty that goes against those rules or, like in the case of historical analysis, might show that - maybe just due to the primacy of the victors - we don't understand our story as well as we like to think or the various ways that we got here, ie. that while most of the content may be correct we're either packing a whole bunch of unchecked assumptions or, alternately, have significantly meaningful areas under or overemphasized.

Pretty much...
There are so many other areas I could research...
I have been venturing outside of philosophy lately, the influences priming WWII as an example...

At this stage, I guess I'd rather be a jack of all trades...
Seriously engaging in such things as classical philosophies is an endeavour involving a dedication in which I am not prepared to invest...
I am happy with shortcuts at the moment...
If postmodernism is sickly and in the decline, I might simply move on...<shrug>

As I keep on saying/implying, I am not a scholar, don't want to be, and investing energies into a philosophical cul-de-sac isn't my thing/thang...
This is part of my reductionist bent...and I like the clinical triage involved in determining what I do and don't research since I come from a "wishy-washy" "sitting on the fence" background that I have now outgrown...

I enjoy clear-cut definitions, wherever possible these days...
I see it as an intellectual challenge...
And I am tired of living in a psychological fog embracing indecision...
Self-determinism, Hoowah!

I have been sitting on this for quite a while...
Way back when bumble boy entered the scene:
You are too intense...

A novice engages/begins in a discussion and gets bombarded with level 50 philosophy involving esoteric references that simply serve to completely confuse...
I don't have your knowledge base but I do have life wisdom...
I know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run...
There are very valid reasons why I extricate myself from a toxic situation...

Arbitrary...

Okay.

The reason I wanted to mention that - when you said that you 'stayed outside' while I was doing the opposite, I partially interpreted that as saying that I was participating in culture's memetic distortions of reality while you were staying clean of it. To that I was prepared to say that while I have sort of method-acted my way through certain situations that required that for gaining certain experiences (like mysticism and the like) I would admit that I did find with some of these things that there's an actual 'there' there - whether it's as profound as what people want it to be or something quite different, that it's been about extracting things that are harder to get at rather than buying said distortions whole-cloth.

I think one of the more challenging things about being on this forum is that I generally don't feel like I get a lot of feedback or direction. If I tend to overload at times it's mainly that I feel like I'm sitting on a body of knowledge that people just aren't familiar with, if anything it's not so much esoteric in its complexity as it is esoteric in context to what our current culture emphasizes. The reason I feel like these things are pertinent to bring up - they seem to relate well to our current blindspots. A lot of our political problems today, for example, relate back to us being dutiful lemmings and acting like 'Well - if the outside world suggests I should do x, based on its prescriptions, I'll do x even if it's self-destructive' (a stupid example might be everyone taking in Alexa like 'Welp! Gone are the days of privacy in my own home!') and there's a whole wealth of knowledge that says 'Nope, you have as many coping mechanisms and workarounds as your mind has imagination'. I think that's really been lost in the sort of plain 'it's all exactly as it appears' way of looking at things that our current culture has. Even just looking at human behavior, how people interact, how minds work, that's clearly not the case. There'd be no cause to talk about red pills, no cause to talk about wokeness, or anything of that sort if there weren't all kinds of layers to social reality that the actors involved even seem to hide from themselves. I'd argue as well that nature is still sitting on plenty of surprises and, maybe to be a bit of a brat here, I'll wrap this one up with a nice philosophical image - we still haven't seen Isis naked.

Arbitrary and contingent are not the same.
You when I throw a normal dice, the number coming up is arbitrary within the range of 1 to 6. That's what contingent means. It could have been any of the 6 numbers, but not ...i don't know...the colour pink.


Postmodernism isn't exactly a cul-de-sac.
It's also not really abandoned, in the way, say, platonic idealism is abandoned.
It's part of everyday life now.
We are in the postmodern condition. Trying to put the issues into a nicely confined section of the bookshelf labelled postmodern philosophy doesn't really work.
It's like putting genetics in a box and declaring: "we now know all genes are made of AGC and T. Now we can close the field of genetics and go back to psychoanalysis and dream interpretation"
Postmodernity is in no way over, merely because the philosophers diagnosing its properties have died in the last thirty years.

However, I admit that these guys are all hard to read.
But Rick Roderick is good at explaining some of it (warch at least episode 8 on Jean Baudrillard. It's good and also hilarious)

Yes, I know...
You are the fountain of wisdom...

I was adding to the conversation and not paraphrasing...
What I should have said was: *And* arbitrary...in a broader sense...
I accept responsibility for the misunderstanding...




I was simply referring to what Dr.Layman was saying...
Perhaps you should take it up with him?...

but ...i.. think its a mislabel
modernism or progressivism aren't out yet, so it's post-what..?
or is it crypto- nihilism, or 'pop(ular)- modernism' of mental and technological consumerism

"The Year of the Sex Olympics - the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite control the media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography."

bread and circuses

everytime a new hab needs propping, prop it with porn?


reading the definitions, wth that's complete gibberish, oh i mean jargon from the properly educated

"The connection between postmodernism, posthumanism, and cyborgism has led to a challenge of postmodernism, for which the terms "postpostmodernism" and "postpoststructuralism" were coined

In some sense, we may regard postmodernism, posthumanism, poststructuralism, etc., as being of the 'cyborg age' of mind over body. Deconference was an exploration in post-cyborgism (i.e. what comes after the postcorporeal era), and thus explored issues of postpostmodernism, postpoststructuralism, and the like. To understand this transition from 'pomo' (cyborgism) to 'popo' (postcyborgism) we must first understand the cyborg era itself."

-how does the defining of being past (post) works, authorative heads deciding to stick with that?

Yeah, academia's propensity towards redefining common words, that are evocative, like cyborg, make it quite difficult for the noob.

It's about embodied cognition, i.e., you are your body, and how it functions not only influences but constitutes your thought and relation to the world and yourself. Media have become extensions of the body, in a sense. Your phone has replaced your sense of orientation, for example, and rather than knowing an area, people follow their phones.

Adding a post- to that indicates a conceptual change that is making things more complicated, but can't be given a unifying name.
Like postmodernity isn't one thing, but rather all sorts of developments after ww2.
There's some relations between these developments, while post-postmodernity indicates there's some new ideas which are characterized by not having been there since ww2 and, say, the financial crisis of 2008.
Postmodernity is deeply linked with neoliberal economy. But neoliberal economy is a zombie now, propped up by bank-bailouts.
Plus, climate change and ecological collapse are real parts if everyday life now.
Hence the change. But it's not uniform, so it doesn't get a unifying name.

There are concepts with defining names, though, like metamodernism and digimodernism, but they are very narrow and don't reflect the breadth of change in thought between say, the "end if history" nineties, and today.

Hence the gibberish, which isn't all gibberish.
Consider it a form of poetry that uses all sorts of images and metaphors, and you'll be much more comfortable with it.