boneyard bill

Posted by God Fearing Atheist:

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quote:
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Originally posted by Friend
I am inquiring about the difference in characteristics of modernity and postmodernity. Does one provide a better opporunity for humanity to succeed and achieve? Are there drastic differences between the two?

Thanks.

~ Friend ~
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Characteristics of postmodernism include references to penises, poo and nonsense more generally:

"The anal penis...fuctions within a devalued metonymic continuity, whereas the notion of the phallomorphic turd functions within the realm of metaphorical substitution. If the bodily in masculinity is encountered in all its rectal gravity, the specular mode by which others become shit is disrupted" -Calvin Thomas

"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the [-square root of -1] of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1)." -Jacques Lacan

"Nevertheless,...structure-or rather, the structurability of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or refering it to a point of presence, a fixed origin" - Jacques Derrida, on the word "center"

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Thanks for clarifying that.

boneyard bill

jig writes:
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=otherwise it sounds reasonable and really sounds no different to the age old philosophical adage of 'question everything', only in much more fancy terms.
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I don't find anything particularly "fancy" about postmodernism. But aside from that I don't think postmodernism is saying "question everything" so much as it is saying that there are only questions and no answers.

Thomas Ash

I just thought I'd say that I've always seen postmodernism as being very much a kneejerk backlash (or is that mixed metaphor? ) against modernism, much like Sodium said. Modernism came along, with it's science, logic and analysis, and started showing up some traditionally held truths as, well, not truths at all, but actually falsehoods. Most in the post-modernist brigade, because of their commonly left-wing ideology (academia is on the whole left wing, I think, not that I particularly mind), didn't have any problem with this insofar as it undermined traditional Western cultural beliefs, like, say, women's unfitness for work, though they often wanted to keep at least some vague notion of a God.
But what they really had a problem with with was the way it undermined non-Western cultures such as, to use a particularly charged example, black African tribes. These had been looked down on for so long that some people were desperate to give them all the claim to civilization they could, sometimes stretching the facts (which I think is actually somewhat patronizing as it sets different standards for different peoples, but that's by the by... )
So they came up with the idea of post-modernism, which legitimised different truths and different standards for different cultures. So, for instance, rain dances or traditional religion were no longer superstitious nonsense, but true within that culture. This was becuase logic and the scientific method were seen as Western constructs rather than the universal truths they are. Never mind that the implications of this - that traditional tribes can never progress, and sorry, it is progress, beyond their current state, and that science is exclusively the preserve of the West - are fantastically patronising. And never mind that it separates people into distinct cultures when such units are as much artificial constructs as genuinely reflective of differences. The same often goes for Western religion, a whole area cut off from the standards of logic and science (conveniently, as we all know! ) And perhaps more seriously, minority cultural or religous pratices such as female genital mutilation for African societies and forbidding blood transfusions for the Jehovah's Witnesses aren't condemned as barbaric, but just treated as subject to different cultural standards which can't be judged, only 'respected.'
All of this is, of course, antithetical to modernity, which would have no problem with judging all these things as wrong and illogical, no matter how deeply held they are by certain cultures. But it's precisely this judgementalism, especially when it's applied to such previously sacred subjects as traiditional religion, culture and morality, which put people off modernism and make them turn to alternatives such as post-modernism, which effectively let them cling towhat they're really out to preserve: pre-modernism.

Any thoughts?

John Page

:notworthy

What's your notion of the next step after pre-post modernism, then? Retro-existentialism?

Cheers, John