I've always had trouble understanding exactly what it means in literature, except that maybe it's deconstructionist and ironic (I think). Could you guys explain to me how it could be defined, authors that are postmodern and how exactly those authors express themselves under that category?
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It’s gay. That’s what Pomo is. Straight homosexualry.
Postmodernism is the rejection of modernism, which was the idea that industrialization & rejection of old, traditional artforms would lead humanity to a utopian golden age. The world wars flipped this mentality around & caused people to conclude that industrialization & old, traditional artforms would lead humanity into a destabilized dehumanized dystopia
Postmodernists are all members of a loosely organized group that is by and large
seen as ‘progressive’. They are on the left rather than the right, and tend to see
everything, from abstract painting to personal relationships, as
political undertakings. Postmodernists tend to believe that "their time has come" and often claim that they have seen through
the sustaining illusions of others, and so have grasped the ‘real’
nature of the cultural and political institutions which surround us.
In doing this, postmodernists often are Marxist. They claim to be particularly aware of the unique state of society.
Exactly none of this is what post modernism is about you fricking dunce. Maybe actually read a book once in while rather than just acting as if you know shit on here as a substitute
>directionbraining postmodernism
>postmodernists often are Marxist
Yeah... maybe try to understand something easier first, anon.
Nonsense. Never type on here again.
>rejection of old, traditional artforms would lead humanity to a utopian golden age
lol
>caused people to conclude that industrialization & old, traditional artforms would lead humanity into a destabilized dehumanized dystopia
lol
how can you be this wrong twice?
kek philosophers and turboprogressives absolutely btfo
something like an ironic in-joke that blurs the boundaries between high brow and low brow, past and present. embraces contradictions and eclectism
POSTMODERNISM WAS THE CONTINUATION OF MODERNISM; MODERNISM WAS THE CONTINUATION OF ROMANTICISM; ROMANTICISM WAS THE CONTINUATION OF ILLUSTRISM; ILLUSTRISM WAS THE ESOTERIC SIDE OF ILLUMINISM.
When it comes to art, what it means is trash, low-effort and deliberately, unironically so. This is for demoralization and money laundering purposes.
>New values
>New narratives
>New goals
>New disciplines
>Reinvent concepts
>Reinvent history
>Reinvent motives
>Reinvent results
>Reject traditions
>Reject continuity
>Reject structure
>Reject linearity
>Subvert power structures and hierarchy
>Subvert beauty and art
>Subvert meaning and truth
>Subvert objectivity
GTK TND RWN
It means any kind of art or philosophy invented after World War II that has two or more of the following properties
>zany
>vulgar
>schizo
>irreverent
Is it postmodern to tell the story out of order to be clever about how interpret it? I experienced that once but just got annoyed and didn't care enough to keep reading.
what about Pulp Fiction?
But Pulp Fiction isn't "clever about how interpret [sic] it". It's out of order to put all the emphasis on that last scene. When white dude (I forgot their names) and black dude are arguing in the last scene, we already know the fruits of white dude's way of seeing things, because we've already seen him die a meaningless death. The strange order is what brings everything together tbh.
Distrust in meta-narratives and teleology following the post-WW2 failures/weaknesses of structuralism in French academia and Marxism generally. Lyotard coined it in his 1979 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition
Glad somebody actually knows what the frick they’re talking about.
Some pretty based replies so far
I HATE postmodernists
OP here. I agree and thanks for the replies. I also had a gut feeling of hating postmodernism, though I've read a few works that I enjoyed that I think are postmodernist if I'm understanding the replies correctly
I can see this being true in some cases — American abstract expressionist art and figures like Pollock I think were promoted in the CIA as part of the “culture war” aspect of the Cold War, to give a sense of American progressiveness, exuberance, freedom and experimentation in the arts as opposed to the Soviet Union’s repressive, restrictive, and propaganda-ruled society only allowing certain “accepted” forms of art (like socialist realism/Soviet realism). [Ironically, of course, in the process, the CIA itself was also acting in a covertly propagandistic manner and deliberately influencing American culture in a secretive way, just less overtly than the Soviets].
However, one part I would disagree on is that ALL artists/authors/poets etc. falling into the “postmodern” slot are mere trash. For this discussion’s sake, we could potentially imagine at least 2 forms of postmodernism. One of them is the one many of us (rightfully, I think) love to hate — things like Damien Hirst’s stupid fricking shark
, or Duchamp’s urinal (perhaps modernist but still a famous precursor of postmodernism), or a banana duct-taped to a wall as an art exhibit, which is something more like a form of performance art ostensibly meant to “shock the audience out of their complacency and make them consider what art really IS” etc., and typically in the process not caring about fine craftsmanship or even conventional beauty, instead it’s more about “concept”, if even that, maybe it’s even “anticonceptual” or “nonconceptual” — “The point is there IS no point, you just project your own meaning into everything! Ha! Sike!”, said in the middle of sucking one’s own wiener, I can imagine.
However, there’s another broad type of mostly post-WW2 literature which also often gets classified as “postmodern”, but which has a far greater attention to craftsmanship, depth of meaning, even going for conventional beauty (of language, imagery, etc.) Nabokov is often labeled a postmodern writer in some of his most well-known and lauded novels like Pale Fire and e-girlta, such as for the metafictional aspects, but they’re also tremendously well-crafted, he’s an amazing stylist, and also in converse with the Western canon and timeless themes expressed throughout by his extensive allusions and references to literature/art of the Western canon (even if it’s to deconstruct or poke some fun at these themes at times). This I could possibly call “high postmodernism”, cribbing off high modernism, but some might even go so far as to argue that modernism and postmodernism can be so similar that these are just continuations of the high modernist/late modernist tradition.
(Cont.)
For instance, getting into the late 1930s to roughly the 1950s, maybe we’re on a liminal cusp between late modernism and “postmodernism” proper, where in fact some postmodern works of this period can be classified as just more late modernism/high modernism. Beckett, for example, straddles that cusp. Gaddis with The Recognitions, too — it could be called one of the last great high modernist novels.
DeLillo is also another great one who has a lot of attention to (amazing) style and craftsmanship, as well as (at his best) probing of profound themes and commentary on the human condition, especially in a modern Western industrialized society. In fact, in speaking of his influences and writerly ethos, D. explicitly said it’s the modernists like Joyce and Faulkner who weee his biggest influences. And that he feels like more of a modernist than a postmodernist, he doesn’t get why he got that label.
Art has to fail to actually look to change things. Postmodernism is a dead way to look at things and that's why it's approved.
If art is good it's already too dangerous for our fear based culture of drones. The beauty would make them see how ugly they are.
To put it less wordily than I did in that post, I still think there’s indeed beauty to be found in some of the “high postmodernists” (my term) like Nabokov, Gass, Gaddis, Delillo, even Pynchon at many times.
What’s called “postmodernism”, especially as applied to literature, doesn’t necessarily mean laziness, lack of style, craftsmanship, effort, and authentic beauty put into it. It can sometimes mean that, but not in every case.
It's the content that has to be obscene or the beauty would make people see how empty they are. It has to be about paedophilia or about a cuckold or if comedic about an ogre in a swamp.
They're so afraid of Wagner and the truly Romantic that sees past all the bullshit.
>They're so afraid of Wagner and the truly Romantic that sees past all the bullshit.
It's because they equate Romanticism with racism. They can't simply see love as what it is.
The israelites have always projected their racism, they can't understand Christianity.
In Parsifal Wagner shows the way forward but Hitler never understood it.
homies really don’t understand Duchamp and fountain, do they?
whats there to understand? he was saying that the very concept of art in the post-industrial era is something upon which to piss. its not frickin finnegans wake dude
Duchamp said the object was picked at random, the urinal aspect does not matter. He lied, it obviously does, but it doesn’t matter in the end, especially because you were filtered and left behind. That’s what you got upset when you saw art do a 360 and walk away, you didn’t get to see what it walked away from, homosexual
Ignoring your post about postmodernism, I hate museums so fricking much. They're such bullshit.
Postmodernism is one of many shorthands for a bunch of philosophers and theorists of media and technology that more or less critique (but don't outright reject) modernism. The high Enlightenment ideas of reason, science, objectivity, and that a pefect society can be built on scientific methods. In literature, its usually about examining the breakdown of modernist assumptions under the weight of new material conditions and technology.e.g. William Gibson's Neuromancer explores the new kinds of subjective experience drugs and digital computing bring and how it breaks down the traditional modernist ideas of the liberal self.
Postmodernism can't be defined because there really isn't a postmodernist school. Its just a conveniant label for a bunch of thinkers who often believe fundamentally different things but are linked together by common theme and an attitude of sticking it to conventional and established thinking. So McLuhan, Deleuze, Zizek, Hideo Kojima get described as pomos but they have relatively little in common beyond their fascination with technology and social breakdown/change. Zizek is a neo-Hegelian and a Lacanian. McLuhan was a theorist of media. Deleuze was trying to revive aspects of medieval philosophy and do metaphysics. Kojima is just a chunibyo game designer. Actually, come to think of it all of them are pretty chuni.
Bearing out the 'death of God' in aesthetics [anti/post-Truth & Beauty]. On the theory side, negating or compromising the Subject and/or any Apodicity that may entail in its metaphysical, epistemic & legal consequences obliging - if not Truth - then Absolute Necessity and any subjectivity bound-up in historical temporalization/contingency/reference. Apophantic Egress instead from the General to the infinitesimally/intensively unform Finite/Abstract. you know, the Negative Infinite Particularity in extremis to the point of losing resolution from over-sharpness and narrowness of focus, naval-gazing-- QUANTUM physics making an end of reification itself is its fellow traveler in the sciences.
Deconstruction (the coinage and its analogues in German are technical; it is dis-assembly to Interiorize Understanding, to enter the subject of thought From Within, to come to know it From Inside-Out. Heidegger picks up from this characterization of Speculative Thought-- the French and ultimately Anglophone strictly Negative characterization of it - as a tool of mere critique - is incapable of closing the loop back to the positive; it is only superficially 'apophatic' as a method, mere template/algorithmic application, boilerplate conceptions in a merry go round of self-reference is all that can come o it. The post-modern is nihilistic exhaustion, decadence, and willing the consequences of defective predecessors' faulty reasoning and Vision-- which only belies the absolute necessity of the Historical to assert anything positive. What passes for artistic training nowadays completely stripped of schools and styles, ateliers of the happenstance and random, and the resultant inconsistency of uniformity beholden to trends and fads driven by commercial ends we see -- the dearth of strong individual sensibilities expressed in personal style & mastery embodying it and the material/cultural tradition's present development & involutions seen presently is unavoidable. Novelty is not an unalloyed good unless the object of effort is Entertainment (or Propaganda), and the post-modern shows its hand as immanent to the system it purports to be set against-- post-modernism is ahistorical from the standpoint of Nuremberg Regime ideologues' political purposes, pursued systematically and obsessively without the frame or (value) standards of reference that mark previous periods-- In Literature that entails James Joyce cargo cultists removing typological structures grounding stream-of-conscious POV/narratives in the world in favor of confessional anarchy & 'polymorphic perverse' infantilism, hiding behind 'unreliable narration'-- the subject's experience is as vicarious and untenable as the status of the Soul/God/Afterlife to the post-christian Westerner; 'there can be no poetry after Auschwitz' because the Narcissist cannot bear looking at himself in the mirror of History's abattoir.
Post-modernism are just modernists that are mad because their version of modernism is not the norm. As a result they try to subvert reality to fit their own narrative, by redefining modernism.
Its when you hate yourself (even more postmodern if you’re a troony).
>gallery had no vetting standards qualitatively, just pay for play
>walla
What comes after post-modernism?
Nothing
D:
Post post-modernism
back to modernism
Both Modernism and Postmodernism are about meaninglessness and accepting that you will lose in life.
Islam is actually postmodern.
The Islamic Renaissance
Accelerationism
Meta-modernism.
It's a control mechanism to prevent real art from being at the forefront. It's oligarch approved art.
its a silly phrase/word really thats outstayed its welcome by a couple of decades. For it to make any sense the author has to state what paradigm of modernity has been surpassed....... so why use it if you have to state what it means and how you are using it?
grandstanding for midwits.
If anyone uses it as if it has set and inherent meaning they are being foolish and should not be listened to (if they buy into one nonsense fad why not others?)
You chuds realize that art is anything except for things that aren't?
Weird for the sake of weird.
>postmodern literature is characterized by an experimental, self-aware, and often irreverent approach that challenges traditional literary forms and assumptions about meaning, truth, and representation.
e-girlta is postmodern because in the book it features a self-aware and unreliable narrator to become what's known as metafiction, it uses intertextuality and reference to other probably older renown or popular literary works to have a postmodern style of "pastiche and appropriation", it doesn't provide clear answers or moral judgements to its premise/story to create an effect or theme of subjetivity or ambiguous nature of reality, it mixes different genres in (road novel, confession, parody) which is experimentation that only postmodern literature does, and it is also respected and cited as influential by other postmodernists as vaunted postmodern work
If you've watched a TV show in the last three decades that has tons of references to other shows or obscure real life occurrences or people or events, has weird divine-like occurrences that made you wonder if that was god or fate or luck or something, has protagonists that are morally dubious, and blend current/recent real world events/issues with the events/issues of their universe for essentially some impromptu & indirect social/political commentary on elections or African American rights or gay acceptance or whatever else is outside of or on the tip of social discourse, then you've probably seen something postmodern
I think they sometimes get too controversial and get vehemently chided by people, usually rightists tbh
pejorative for anything that mentions TV
If you're wondering about why so much postmodern physical art is dog fricking shit read this.
Serious question as a midwit: are novels like Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 postmodern?
Catch-22 is known as a postmodern classic
This is what postmodernism is:
>lets get rid of standards
>having no standards is more intellectual that having standards
>do you like this abject bullshit made without any standards? no? I guess you are not smart enough then. I like it: I'm smart enough.
Generally, a rejection of meta narratives mostly associated with French philosophers in the 60s.
The 'definition' of post-modernism is useless and is entirely as abstract/nonsense as many people make so called 'postmodern' thinkers works to be. conflating figures like deleuze, baudrillard, foucault, and derrida together is entirely erroneous if you've read any of them beyond very vague allusions. Rejection of meta narratives is silly too when you realise that throughout the history of philosophy, a litany of authors (to varying degrees) have engaged in it; Nietzsche would come to play too.
Post-structuralist is even worse, because its definitionally worse--someone like Foucault for instance is definitively a structuralist as per his own admission + reading any of his early to mid-mature works will clearly illustrate that, but again is grouped under the post-structuralist label quite frequently.
Ironically enough, supposed pomos are subjected to definitionally wrong taxonomy/categorisation which is partly what many of the thinkers associated with that strand of thought were exactly trying to escape lol.
tell me you havent read any serious work of philosophy without saying you havent read any serious work of philosophy
Foucault's work is littered with historical sources and reports
Deleuze has a very strong grounding in metaphysics; engaging with Hume, Kant, Spinoza and Nietzsche very faithfully, though to reach his own conclusions. Saying he has no standards here is entirely moronic.
Derrida engages in a lot of etymlogical analaysis... which is impossible without rigorous historical work and linguistic analysis. He directly cites figures like Heidegger, Husserl, Rosseau, etc.
Please find me these lack of standards that you seem to find endemic amongst "post modernists"
You won't make me waste time on you.
>Foucault
>Deleuze
>Derrida
They all say nothing.
Citing past standards as a failed mechanism of engaging with the world is not lack of standards
To compile replies so far, it seems that the term post-modernism means nothing or whatever is convenient at the time. It's similar to how people in US use word communism/ist.
>what is postmodernism?
>posts modernism
The idea that postmodernism has no clear definition is very postmodern
what is postmodernism but a miserable pile of secrets
Most people don't know this but deleuze and guattari are really the fathers of post modernism. Every post modern thinker that came after them is really derivative of their ideology in some sense. One major shift from enlightenment thinkers is really their absolute rejection of atomism, positivism, and most of that rationalist enlightenment thinking. The "virtual" is of great significance, he diverges from materialists such as marx in his rejection of the dialectic. For deleuze and guattari, things exist abstractly and these abstract machines shape matter In their own way... Similar to how consciousness operates in a brain. That somehow matter is secondary. There is really no comparing the thinking of deleuze and guattari with their contemporaries. They would be laughed out the room by high minded enlightened modernists for their uniquely strange approach to philosophy.
Not only did they reject idealism, materialism, dialectics, and positivism, but they also seeked to undermine the works of psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. A large corpus of their work is devoted to outright mocking thinkers like Freud, taking only with them dream interpretation, and stripping away everything else. This can be said to be the most radical thing they did, working as clinicians at Labord. Go ahead and read up on the mental institution they ran. The patients actually set it on fire eventually and burned it down. Deleuze and Guattaris entire school, were Maoist Badiou taught, lost accreditation. Deleuzes works were banned by Lacan and widely suppressed. Deleuze's feud with Badiou and the Maoists was actually so bad that troops of student Maoist militias would interrupt his class. Deleuze heavily clashed with many hard-line communists and formulated a very complex theory about paranoic dictators and history. Profoundly he said very little or nothing about economics, and applied Marxism to psychology and psychoanalysis in a revolutionary way. This inevitably led to the wokeism people complain about today. Deleuze and Guattari however, were truly woke to the bullshit. They didn't believe in gender binaries... They were very pro lgbt at a time when LGBT people were being suppressed by enlightenment modernists under the guide of psychiatry and legitimate medical practice. Ultimately what deleuze and Guattari did was uproot all of modernity... This inspired all kinds of people to think outside the box, encouraged a very systemic critique of the system, and created a whole new erratic and strange style of writing and thinking. The works of Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol 1 and 2 were written at random. Literally. Everyday he would write a new sentence on a random page in a random order and just write the whole book like that, sentence by sentence, never actually constructing a whole idea at once but in pieces. These thinkers... Are extremely interesting to read about... And it's very clear why modernists hate them.. because they're epic.
the basic point is that effort doesn't matter and our natural human instinct to believe something which is apparently effortful is therefore more valuable should be fought against
None of this fricking shit is postmodernism. Everybody on here doesn't know what the frick they're talking about. Read Lyotard's "Postmodern Condition." Thank me later.
Mhm right..
truest shit ever said
"There is no such thing as a father in general. There is only a father who works at the bank, who works in a factory, who is unemployed, who is an alcoholic: the father is only the element of a particular social machine. According to traditional psychoanalysis, it's always the same father and always the same mother--always the same triangle. But who can deny that the Oedipal situation differs greatly, depending on whether the father is an Algerian revolutionary or a well-to-do executive? It isn't the same death which awaits your father in an African shanty town as in a German industrial town; it isn't the same Oedipus complex or the same homosexuality. It may seem stupid to have to make such statements, and yet such swindles must be denounced tirelessly: there is no universal structure of the human mind!"
Félix Guattari
This kind of says it all with Guattari also... Is they really wholly reject the model of understanding poised by modernity flat out... Not just that... But they openly lament at the stupidity, the banality, and the pointlessness of modernist thinkers.
"We focus our attention on impending catastrophes, while the true catastrophes are already here, under our noses, with the degeneration of social practices,
with the mass media's numbing effect, with a collective will blinded by the ideology of the 'market', in other words, succumbing to the law of the masses,
to entropy, to the loss of singularity, to a general and collective infantilization. The old types of social relations, the old relations with sex, with time, with
the cosmos, with human finitude have been rattled, not to say devastated, by the 'progress' generated by industrial firms"
Félix Guattari
Extermination or communism is the choice – but this communism must be more than just the sharing of wealth (who wants all this shit?) – it must inaugurate a whole new way of working together.
Félix Guattari
It must be said that post modernism did more for Marxism than leninism and maoism did in the past century. Post Modernism presents an actual alternative to traditional forms of communism anarchy and capitalism with a deeply proactive intellectual adventure. This really gave the opportunity for the radical politics to flourish at a time when it seemed synonymous with dictatorship and utopianism. They truly came to break down the walls erected by liberal humanism and orthodox Marxism. This is more a revolution in thought than anything else.
A lot of what post-modernists write is basic information, just shrouded in a veil of complexity. For them it does not need to be complete, clear or concise. It's not great literature. A simple table of contents would be useful for them, and good information architecture would be nice but is asking far too much.