The Ag people had real shit to deal with, so didn't need to cook up synthetic forms of BS.

Yeah, absolutely. My mother trained in the sixties, I in the eighties, she had to put up with theoretical lectures on modernp. art, I spent months in a South London boys comp. No substitute for shovelling shit.

I started a doctorate in the 1990s and my supervisor was very post m. It was as if here was a product with which he might scoop the market. I transferred to Bristol and studied the semiotics of French televison for two years before realising it was absolute bullshit. there are no social phenomena - merely what our masters wish us to see.

It's ironic, the notion that post-modernism has been influenced by Nietzsche.

I believe the identity of political individualism is libertarianism.

I believe the identity of political individualism is libertarianism. — praxis

Does it have to be?

Can it coherently be framed as identity politics if everyone occupies a demographic of one?

If the goal is a demographic of one then political individualism or libertarianism would be a poor choice to start with because the value set it holds to is rather unusual, in the USA anyway. Something like 10% of Americans are registered libertarian.

I’m not sure if it’s even possible to have large cooperative groups without a unifying identity/ideology, and any identity may necessarily rely on an ‘other’ to give it meaning.

I wonder if you're familiar with The Sokal Affair?

It's ironic, the notion that post-modernism has been influenced by Nietzsche. — whollyrolling

It's not ironic in the least. In my uneducated and completely irreverent opinion (as I'm not well-read in Nietzsche and have a low opinion of him), Nietzsche first gave voice to the notion that there is no objective reality (well, first in relatively recent times, the Sophists beat him to it in some ways but we'll leave that aside.) I think it comes from his mis-reading of Schopenhauer, which gave rise to his notion of 'perspectivism', which is 'that all truth claims are contingent on, and the product of, a person's perspective. Nietzsche's philosophy attacks the concept of essential truth and seeks to destabilize the concept of universal morality.' One of the reasons he's such a sacred cow in modern campuses. The only irony is that he is regarded as a philosopher, in my view.

Accounts I've read put it mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, with perhaps just a few forerunners in the forties. — andrewk

It grew out of the aftermath of WWII. Started with many playwrights like Brecht who focused on questioning the form of theatre within the plays he wrote. The traditional views and "truths" had too much emphasis on optimism in the industrial age and WWII put a knife through that heart. Postmodernism grew out of the philosophical skepticism people had against the old "truths" that were taken for granted before witnessing the horrors of WWII.

While continental philosophy and postmodernism may be criticized for being vague and not enough analytical in form, the ideas are still very important. Nietzsche would be at home in postmodernism ideas and he was before his time. If he hadn't died at such an early age and if his sister hadn't corrupted his ideas into Hitler's head, the would probably look quite different today. I wonder how the birth of postmodernism had looked if Nietzsche had lived on.

I think to postmodernism was inevitable though. Soon or later people will question ideas, question the nature of thinking. The more we knew about how human psychology works, the more we knew about science and technology, the less sense religious ideas made. Postmodernism is a skepticism which grew out of questioning such "truths" about the world. As the world progress, postmodernism will eventually appear as a skeptical form.

It's ironic, the notion that post-modernism has been influenced by Nietzsche. — whollyrolling

Maybe because most people don't understand post-modernism? And think it's something Jordan Peterson complains about, something vague that exists today. Post-modernism has become some politically charged term by tribalistic groups who haven't read a word of philosophy.

For example, in the world of architecture it was used for eclecticism, in which case you could say it began under the Victorians — Ricardoc

Postmodernism indeed has its roots in the later 1800s. Two of the bigger influences on it were the realization that Euclidean geometry wasn't akin to God-given law and the weirdness of black-body radiation physics and quantum phenomena. There were parallels in the arts with the rise of impressionism, Fauvism, expressionism, etc. and the move away from traditional diatonicism in music, leading to serialism and atonalism shortly after the turn of the 20th Century.

there are no social phenomena - merely what our masters wish us to see. — Ricardoc

The unfortunate truth. This is why academia in the social sciences is dying a slow death. But that's what you get when you throw out objectivity as a method.

Maybe because most people don't understand post-modernism? — Christoffer

Starting from the students who are taught post-modernism, yet don't know anything else about philosophy. Besides, interdisciplinary studies demand too much from ordinary students.

Where do they teach post-modernism outside of itself as a philosophical foundation?

By implication, it also means that some teach anti-post-modernism without knowing anything about philosophy. Have you seen the infantile arguments between the two sides? It's tribalism

In both a narrow and a broader context, he's invariably attacking what stems from religious morality, and if you look at his life and times, there are reasons for this, though they're not necessarily "reasonable" reasons.

He also attacks the results, both in his time and in the future he imagines, of the removal of subjective morality. Anyone who takes from his writing that they should follow suit or live by any code or invent any philosophy based on the emptiness of morality he describes he actually condemns them to the nihilism he sees burgeoning in his time--within that same writing.

I haven't read enough Schopenhauer to comment on his interpretation of the man's work, but I do know that in Nietzsche's time, numerous philosophers were misinterpreting each other's work, and he noted instances of this about his own work. The same misinterpretations are happening to this day, so it seems.

Post-modernism as I understand the movement, maybe not well enough, is pushing its philosophy in precisely such a direction as Nietzsche condemned as a phase of vapidity and ignorance before philosophy would perhaps gradually get back on track.

To predict something is not the same as to encourage it, especially when it's being openly discouraged I would say. To take everything a philosopher despises about a potential future and become it is not to be influenced by that philosopher--it is to be in opposition to that philosopher.

And so they willfully embrace their ignorance while impressing it on young minds under the thin veil of "higher education".

The Sokall affair I have come across. I know exactly exactly why it happened, too. In ıts passion for deconstruction and getting away from anything remotely systematic, never mind Marxist, the academic world repeatedly shot itself in the foot. There was loads of bogus work going on - my supervisor in Bristol wrote her thesis on French cinema, but the fact of the matter was that most of the philosophical emanations of postmodernism foreswore objetivity and gave way to subjective readings of the 'text' - or as Humpty Dumpty says, 'A word means exactly what I want it to mean.' So, in legislation we have the fact that the victim of racism, etc. has the right to define the crime him or herself.

From this, more recently, we have the nonsensical phrase of the crypto-conservtive, 'Cultural Marxism' - whatever the hell that means. And we also have achieved the apotheosis of identity politics where whether or not you are allowed to choose your own gender matters more thanwar, pestilence or famine. Petty-bourgeois individualism has become an epistemology in its own right.

A further source of intense amusement concerned a book entitled 'Down the Road and Far Away.' It was ostensibly written by a young Asian girl, and was snapped up by Virago Press. When the author turned out to be ab ABglican clergyman, the sound of book pulping deafened the world of literature.

They're becoming the most despised aspects of the most pessimistic grievances of a bygone philosophical era while calling themselves "progressive".

Where do they teach post-modernism outside of itself as a philosophical foundation? — Christoffer

Oh that's easy. For instance in Social History.

You don't have to have any, absolutely no studies in philosophy, but in social history you do stumble into Foucault. After all, Foucault's famous book The History of Madness is, as the title say, a historical study.

And thus the professor has to give a really short introduction to Foucault and then the history students use postmodernism quite easily. And not in the context of literary criticism, but as part of historiography.

Foucault is best quoted but never read., Has anyone actually finished a book by Derrida? (Cross out 'finished'.)

Foucault is best quoted but never read., Has anyone actually finished a book by Derrida? (Cross out 'finished'.) — Ricardoc

In the 60's it was typical in the leftist Finnish university circles to brag about finishing all volumes of Das Kapital.

But it's an age old philosophy trick to right as difficult as you can. Especially when you don't have much to say. Simplicity isn't something appreciated in academia. I think that Foucault himself admitted this when someone found his talks and opinions (aside a lecture perhaps) quite clear and his books very confusing and difficult.

Personally, I think that post-modernism is more of a symptom than a real cause of the rise of extreme leftism. We can't really say 'post-modernism caused x,' as it's simply an extension of certain forms of expression. There isn't really any particular categorical form we can say 'that is post-modern.' It's essence is definitive, open, and self-consciously so.