'Postmodernism' as Existential Threat.

[woops]

what exactly is the difference? Ive just assumed post structuralism refers specific to a type of academic writing while post modernism is just the more broad term that, amongst other things , can be short hand for the era that contains post structuralist writers.

structuralism is a moment in linguistics defined by ferdinand de saussure's work. modernism is a wider movement in the arts. it gets blurry once you add a "post-" prefix

 

[line b]

structuralism is a moment in linguistics defined by ferdinand de saussure's work. modernism is a wider movement in the arts. it gets blurry once you add a "post-" prefix

thats basically what I said no?

 

[woops]

you wz right

 

[vershy versh]

 

[mixed_biscuits]

View attachment 12341

That front cover is an existential threat

 

[Clinamenic]

I think we need a new language for this stuff. It doesn't make sense that nothing was modern until modernism, the term 'modern' itself is hundreds of years old.

I tend to think that modernism is the phase of enlightenment culture when secular thought started to prevail, vis a vis dogmatic theism, and that post-modernism is the phase of culture when this secular thought has been normalized.

 

[Clinamenic]

But yeah we have traces of modern culture strewn about history, likely centuries if not millennia before modernism proper. I tend of think of modernism proper gaining steam with Luther, the printing press, Galileo, becoming philosophically canonized by the likes of Descartes, etc.

And then over the following centuries, this kind of thinking became normalized, IE lost its novelty as contradistinguished against Catholic cosmological dogma. This normalization of secular values and epistemologies resets the stage for post-modern culture to gain momentum, although again there are still cases to be made for early instances of postmodern thought, IE artists and thinkers who personally "passed through" these phases philosophically, following some sublime avant-garde instinct, afforded by the ability to distance oneself from what is normalized around them, and contextualize it all within a larger development, in order to probe beyond it.

 

[Clinamenic]

Of course, I'm really just talking about Christian culture here, rather than global.

 

[woops]

But yeah we have traces of modern culture strewn about history, likely centuries if not millennia before modernism proper. I tend of think of modernism proper gaining steam with Luther, the printing press, Galileo, becoming philosophically canonized by the likes of Descartes, etc.

And then over the following centuries, this kind of thinking became normalized, IE lost its novelty as contradistinguished against Catholic cosmological dogma. This normalization of secular values and epistemologies resets the stage for post-modern culture to gain momentum, although again there are still cases to be made for early instances of postmodern thought, IE artists and thinkers who personally "passed through" these phases philosophically, following some sublime avant-garde instinct, afforded by the ability to distance oneself from what is normalized around them, and contextualize it all within a larger development, in order to probe beyond it.

id differentiate between modernity and modernism

 

[Clinamenic]

id differentiate between modernity and modernism

Modernity to me has more of a temporal connotation, indicating some contemporary setting, but that could just be me. I think the -ism in modernism denotes the sort of ideology and philosophy I'm talking about above.

 

[Clinamenic]

Which I think is definitively secular, but again that could just be me. Even if we're talking about any sort of modernist exegesis of scripture, such would be defined by some acknowledgement of the scientific secularism, whether to refute it or reconcile with it.

 

[Clinamenic]

Although maybe the movement away from theism is less definitive of modernism, and more the movement away from dogmatic worldviews. After all, the protestant reformation wasn't secular, but rather challenged dogma qua ecclesiastic authority, to my understanding.

 

[Clinamenic]

Maybe a more general understanding of modernism, as a cultural quality, is this emphasis on the individual practicing some greater degree of sovereignty over their worldview, rather than everyone's worldview being homogenously determined by some central dogma, with deviance being punished.

In this sense, modernism is arguably more about individualism than secularism per se. And by extension, postmodernism would be the gradually succeeding cultural phase wherein individualism becomes normalized, IE cultural deviation takes individualism as a point of departure.

 

[Mr. Tea]

aren't we seeing the grand narratives re-assert themselves via conspiracy, cummings runs the UK, etc? like we want a simpler strongman trump type leader on the one hand and a complex QAnon scenario behind the scenes

Boris Johnson suggests Labour and ‘deep state’ plotting to take UK back into EU

PM uses conspiracy theorists’ phrase, as he claims Labour leader will overturn Brexit at ‘drop of a hat’

www.independent.co.uk

 

[sus]

The only problem with the modern Left is it isn't postmodern enough. It pays lip service to social construction theory while naturalizing its own political projects as "inevitable" and "biological." It applies cultural relativism inconsistently and as convenient to its political ends.

A Left that took seriously Berger, Luckmann, Bourdieu, Foucault, Latour—this would be a Left I would get behind. A beautiful vision of the world. A vantage outside games, outside projects. An actualization of the original American pragmatism project.

 

[Murphy]

 

[vershy versh]

​

GLOSS: Nietzsche, Artaud, Schmitt, Hegel, Saint Paul, German romanticism, and surrealism: deconstruction's task is, apparently, to produce fastidious commentaries targeting anything that, in the history of thought, has carried any intense charge. This new form of policing that pretends to be a simple extension of literary criticism beyond its date of expiration is, in fact, quite effective in its own domain. It won't be long before it has managed to rope off and quarantine everything from the past that is still a little virulent within a cordon sanitaire of digressions, reservations, language games and winks, using its tedious tomes to prevent the prolongation of thought into gesture - in short, to struggle tooth and nail against the event. No surprise that this wave of global prattle emerged out of a critique of metaphysics understood as privileging the "simple and immediate" presence of speech over writing, of life over the text and its multiplicity of significations. It would certainly be possible to interpret deconstruction as a simple Bloomesque reaction. The deconstructionist, incapable of having an effect on even the smallest detail of his world, being literally almost no longer in the world and having made absence his permanent mode of being, tries to embrace his Bloomhood with bravado. He shuts himself up in that narrow, closed circle of realities that still affect him at all - books, texts, films, and music - because these things are as insubstantial as he is. He can no longer see anything in what he reads that might relate to life, and instead sees what he lives as a tissue of references to what he has already read. Presence and the world as a whole, insofar as Empire allows, are for him purely hypothetical. Reality and experience are for him nothing more than dubious appeals to authority. There is something militant about deconstruction, a militancy of absence, an offensive retreat into the closed but indefinitely recombinable world of significations. Indeed, beneath an appearance of complacency, deconstruction has a very specific political function. It tries to pass off anything that violently opposes Empire as barbaric, it deems mystical anyone who takes his own presence to self as a source of energy for his revolt, and makes anyone who follows the vitality of thought with a gesture a fascist. For these sectarian agents of preventive counter-revolution, the only thing that matters is the extension of the epochal suspension that fuels them. Immediacy, as Hegel has already explained, is the most abstract determination. And our deconstructionists know well that the future of Hegel is Empire.

Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

 

[vershy versh]

Brutal, although you can't complain about being called a fascist when you're moaning about people "disqualifying intensity" by critiquing Schmitt. This is similar to Land's criticism of D&G policing desire, which made it pretty clear where he might be headed. And that line about following "the vitality of thought with a gesture" sounds like Mishima, another fascist.

😂

That being said, the criticism of deconstruction is something k-punk leveled at it too; pulls things apart and constantly kneecaps. I can see why that particular strand of "postmodernism" would be deemed an existential threat. If all you can do is deconstruct, you're left with rubble.

 

[vershy versh]

"The deconstructionist, incapable of having an effect on even the smallest detail of his world, being literally almost no longer in the world and having made absence his permanent mode of being, tries to embrace his Bloomhood with bravado. He shuts himself up in that narrow, closed circle of realities that still affect him at all - books, texts, films, and music - because these things are as insubstantial as he is. He can no longer see anything in what he reads that might relate to life, and instead sees what he lives as a tissue of references to what he has already read. Presence and the world as a whole, insofar as Empire allows, are for him purely hypothetical. Reality and experience are for him nothing more than dubious appeals to authority."

I'm not a deconstructionist, but this was a little too close to home.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm not a deconstructionist, but this was a little too close to home.

Have you, or would you, ever meet one of us in person? You're probably Rendezvous #1 on this forum.