I’ve noticed this term tossed around quite a bit, but I’ve never quite got it. I’ve seen it used to describe art, philosophy, I think political meanderings, and I think language deconstruction (which also confuses me)… 
When did it start?
Is it a movement, per se?
If the beats has Ginsberg and Kerouac, post modernism has…?
What does it describe?
Hope this is the right forum…
This might help.
Which reminds me. Did you hear they’re doing a PoMo remake of The Godfather?
He’ll make you an offer you can’t understand.
To quote Moe the bartender from the Simpsons: “Weird for the sake of weird.”
Post Modernism is in many ways the opposite of modernism. Modernism, prevalent throughout most of the 20th century, is the idea of making a complete break with the past and coming up with entirely new ways of making art.
(as a musician I can really only speak in terms of the music world but I know that these ideas apply to the other arts and even pop cultural trends as well).
E.g. in music at the turn of the 20th century, composers were concerned with completely ignoring a system that had been established over centuries, and eventually creating new methodologies.
Post modernism, surfacing circa the 70’s, is a sort of timelessness in the arts. There is the complete lack of the idea of progress. Instead anything from the past can be juxtaposed with anything else from any other past (or any other culture).
For example, when George Harrison used a sitar in Beatles music, he was clearly referencing Indian cultural music, but when Beck used a sitar, it was simply another sound in the mix of many sounds. It carried with it no reference to a particular time, nor cultural.
Postmodernism is also concerned with irony and the fake.
Post-Modernism is the precursor to Pre-Futurism. To be followed by Futurism, then Post-Futurism. To be followed by Academic Naming Ad Nauseum.
Well, for postmodern architecture, I think Kohn Pedersen Fox and Johnson Burgee are two firms that have done some very definitive work. In the Boston area, check out 125 Summer Street and 101 Federal Street by KPF and International Place and 500 Boylston by Johnson Burgee. There’s also 75 State Street, by Graham Gund.
Generally, what to look for is touches of other styles wildly misappropriated, such as the paladian windows of International Place.
I’m not sure what the current crop of buildings going up around town would considered, but they seem a bit more modern (using both meanings of modern) than postmodern. Maybe postmodern neo-modern?
Would it be appropriate to draw an analogy between modernism vs. post modernism on the one hand, and classical vs. quantum physics on the other?
If so, how do we quantify the probability of a randomly selected piece of post modern art sucking?
Sigh. It is just so fun to bash something you don’t understand, isn’t it?
Yes, yes it is!
And my question (the first one, at least :)) stands. I drew the analogy because quantum physics introduced the concepts of uncertainty and limits of knowledge into a field where, before, everything had been conceived of as sort of an enormous clockwork that could eventually be completely understood.
OG BASH!
Yes, in a way they are very comparable, because the artistic “movement” at any given time directly reflects the concrete questions humans are asking about their world, and the methods they are using to answer them. You might even say the quantum physics helped give birth to postmodernism, in small part, if that makes any sense.
Does it to a postmodernist? Should it? Does it even matter? 
You’re confusing postmodernism with nihilism. Required viewing:TBL.
Some interesting reading on Heisenberg, the Uncertaincy Principle, and postmodernism here (warning: from National Review Online, very very conservative)
The article goes way farther than this, but the essence is: the U.P. led to the philosophical belief (pomo) that absolute truth does not exist. The author sees postmodernism as a Very Bad Thing.
masonite, that article seems rather slanderous. The man invoked Godwin’s Law in the second (possibly first, depending on the reading) paragraph! Sheesh.
And if any of the above descriptions of post-modernism are correct, it seems there are some serious conceptual issues involved that the author does not grasp.
Yeesh.
chriszarate, instead of trying to calm the pundits, could you help answer my OP? You speak like you have a grasp of “what it is”.
The most Post Modern thing on these boards was Nurlman’s legendary thread. Some of you will not quite see it, but erislover will: that thread is (or was) this board. As a text it is part of it, yet it encapsulates it. But it only does so if you already know the board. Ah! you say, then the board’s the real board, and thread’s just a text. But that equally true of the board as a whole - it’s just a text. And so on. The “meaning” of a text or a life has no independent meaning - it lives within its own frame of reference. Every attempt to “explain” what goes on in there is another text. To quote the novelist (and literary theorist) David Lodge every decoding is another encoding.
Two anecodotes. I went to see legendary postmodern thinker Jacques Derrida speak on the topic of “forgiveness”. It turned out that the talk was about the question of forgiving Germans for the Holocaust. The talk began with the examination of a single letter about the subject by a French philosopher who had opined to a German mate that acts had been committed that were unforgivable. Through a truly dazzling three hours, Derrida proceded to show that the true nature of forgiveness was to forgive only the unforgivable. At the end of the talk I couldn’t decide whether or not I was impressed. On the one hand, many intriguing and challenging things had been said - things I still wrestle with. On the other, I got the feeling that the man could have started with any document and through rather persuasive textual analysis come to any damn conclusion he liked. The whole thing was like peeling an onion. I was also rather concerned that he was only concerned with a text about the Holocaust, not with the thing itself. But after a while, I decided that that was kind of the point.
Second story. A few years ago there was a great debate in economics about rhetoric. Donald (now Deidre) McCloskey wrote a great book about the clothes that arguments in economics wear and how you could understand a whole lot about economics by looking at the way things were argued. This produced a great deal of interest and economists busied themselves looking at (inter alia) how neoclassical economics was in essence Bowdlerised nineteenth century physics. Then a literary theorist had a bit of a look at the papers that were being produced and said (I paraphrase ;)) “You folks have it all wrong. You look at these things and say economic rhetoric has influenced what economists think of as the truth or good work and want to strip it away so as to get to the truth or some better research programme. You can’t. Recognise that these are just texts and that’s it.”
Well, thus far, so good. I think the arguments pretty powerful. But then again, so what? If the search for meaning is Quixotic, haven’t the literary theorists just argued themselves out of a job? And this is where they get themselves into trouble with the “hermenuetics of quantum thingies” garbage that the Sokal affair exposed. Quantum theory does say that observing something does alter stuff, and that sounds like “every decoding is another encoding”. But it’s not. It refers to measurable things at the quantum level and not to objects of classical size. Thus far (as far as my very woolly understanding of this matter goes) what postmodernists have engaged in is good argument about literary theory combined with laughably misunderstood notions about the natural sciences. You can’t conquer the natural sciences with bad analogies, however opaquely you state them.
IMHO that’s where the debate lies: the postmodernists emphasise the frame-dependent nature of understanding and meaning. Their questions are serious, but their challenge to knowledge is unclear (and obfuscated).
[applause]
Given what I got from that, I’m not sure anecdotal evidence could be trumped, hawthorne.
It is also entirely possible that I am a post-modernist philosopher, in no small part thanks to logical positivists and Wittgenstein who, in my searchings, have often been cited as PM-thinking.
Enough hand-waiving. My original thought was that it was more of a buzzword like “political correctness” which pundits applied to all sorts of things and that it was essentially a meaningless description. But if its thrust is to painfully point out underlying assumptions, it certainly could apply to all manner of things like political rhetoric, philosophy, semantics, and so on.
Thanks a ton.
Well, if I were a philosopher at all… :rolleyes: lol
Mostly postmodernism/poststructuralism is not a theoretical viewpoint or vantage point, although it is often positioned as such in order to serve as a contrasting argument, e.g., in academic circles where an existing theoretical perspective has been established.
It is instead a tactic. If the arguments that comprise its tactics were to be taken as theoretical axioms, postmodernism/poststructuralism would be the theory that nothing can be said to have any meaning, for the following reasons:
_ The meaning of anything must be meaning perceived. Someone has to do the perceiving. Problem is, the meaning therefore is peceived only through the lens of the perceiving person’s experience, or, in postie nomenclature, is an artifact of the perceiving person’s location in history (time, culture, social status, situation, etc)
_ The perceiving person is entirely “socially constructed”, meaning that there is no pure experience of “experiencing things as they are” lying underneath all of the contextual biases caused by location in history–sorry, that’s all there is. You are a product of your environment and that is all that you are.
_ Similarly, the “anything” does not have an underlying layer of “true meaning” that is simply distorted or obscured by people’s biases and situation-specific viewing angles. Meaning is always “socially constructed” as well. Thus, things mean what they mean only as an artifact of history, and nothing is intrinsic. (You can’t even posit that there would be a de facto objectivity if we could all get together and compare notes and distill a description from combining all of our experiences, since no matter how many of us there are, we, collectively or individually, are just products of our environment).
_ The process of communicating and comparing notes about what is perceived (as mentioned above) is always and inevitably a power struggle known as a “discourse” in which the act of defining or putting something into words or attributing meaning to it is necessarily the triumphing of one perspective over others, none of which are any more “right” than the others, but all of which are “of” the experience and social location of those whose descriptions win out, and all of which go on to “construct” our social experience of reality. Everything is power struggle, nothing is meaning.
As has been said elsewhere (and fairly often), postie crit is a dismantling tool. This kind of thinking lets you tear apart assertions but it isn’t much good if you want to make assertions of your own. And if you were to try in all seriousness to adopt it as the foundation for your political and sociological world-view, you’d end up in a pile of disassembled belief systems and no glue to put anything together. (The minute you open your mouth you are just spouting the results of your socio-historical location and mirroring a bunch of socially constructed meanings which by definition can’t correlate to any intrinsic meaning since none exists, and furthermore you are by definition attempting to stomp out someone else’s view or opinion or perspective through your act of putting stuff into words)