Actually, the apocalypse, the ‘end of days’, has quite a long historical pedigree. But the thing is, it has never seemed so likely, nor the means so plausible, as during this century, when such myths are long forgotten.

The last "metanarritive" to fall is the future. This knowledge is now pervasive. Is this late stage postmodernism, or are we now in some new, eschatological condition? — hypericin

Well, spacetime is doomed, so why not?

Postmodernism proper begins around the first two decades of the 20th C. 'All that is solid melts into air'. 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold'. — Wayfarer

I was always taught (sociology, sorry) that postmodernism begins mid 20th Century, esp 1960's. I think the theory's slippery lack of specificity is telling and appropriately ironic. I guess you are trying to align it to a bigger picture.

I think it maybe only became recognised, or aware of itself, later in the century but intuitively I feel it harks back to WWI and the discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics. Modernism still held to the idea of there being an objective reality, when even that is called into question by such discoveries. (I always felt that somehow Lewis Carroll had an intuition of all of this.) And of course the terrible slaughter of WWI and the slide into WWII undermined faith in the idea of progress. But of course that is all conjectural and the boundaries are slippery, which as you say is apt.

I hear you and I have often thought likewise. Agree about WWI and mechanized slaughter erasing the final optimistic glint from modernism and the 'wonderful machine age'. It would be nice and convenient to tie it to QM and the end of certainty.

The last "metanarrative" to fall is the future. This knowledge is now pervasive. Is this late stage postmodernism, or are we now in some new, eschatological condition? — hypericin

:up: The absurd (re: Zapffe, Camus, Rosset, Murray, Brassier) is / has always been, it seems, the Human condition.

Well, I think most people place their hopes in improvements of human life due to medical science and science;based technology. — Janus

Cheers Janus. While the anti-vax lunatic fringe might disagree, I think most people would agree. By contrast, would you say that most people agree or disagree with the sentence: Our use of technology is causing a catastrophic global warming event?

While I anticipated that most experienced pomophobes wouldn't resist jumping the gun a tad, this is precisely why I've limited this first thread to the fundamental claim of pomo: that people lost their faith in grand narratives, unity, and authorities. What replaces these gets somewhat more contentious. Few of the noteworthy pomos were relativists, in fact many were Christians.

This is my first exposure to the subject and I was favorably impressed with your description of the issue; so much so that I fell right in with the description of postmodernism so completely as to see it — James Riley

Hell, what a responsibility! I hope I was accurate enough. On which...

Self-disgust had nothing to do with it. Empires shed their empires because they could not hold on to them any longer. Then too, the natives were getting restless, never a good thing for the regime. — Bitter Crank

"Self-disgust" is probably the wrong term, I agree. There were several reasons, finances not least. But here I was referring to the fact that, after Hitler, it was untenable to control those restless natives with force. We had told everyone that what the Nazis had done was evil, even though we'd just been doing it ourselves. Two years later, Britain ceded India. Not a coincidence.

There's even something called postmodern architecture, based on deconstruction. — Manuel

I hope to get on to this in a follow-up thread, but pomo culture is typically either post-marxist (which is why Jordan Peterson is a tool) or post-Freud. Check out the book Less Is A Bore for a sense of pomo architecture... It's basically anti-Marxist rather than deconstructive, but yeah there's some theory there too.

It's just quite baffling that they never really gave a good response to Sokal and Bricmont's books or arguments. — Manuel

After Sokal there was a period of bridge-building, inter-disciplinary conferences and workshops, probably the foundation of interdisciplinary university activity today if I can risk a grand narrative. Including Sokal iirc. He managed to stop being a douchebag in the end.

I think you would first still need to agree that po-mo had provided a particular lens through which to view things. I am not sure this can be readily established. — Tom Storm

Hopefully I've made the case that early pomo sapiens in language (Lyotard, Baudrillard) did have such a view, insofar as they observed a change in how people were using language, particularly in politics, advertising, universities, etc.

My belief is that post-modernism describes a real social condition and period in history, that the 'modern' period began with Newton's publication of his Natural Principles and ended with Einstein's publication of Special Relativity. Between those two bookmarks, the belief that the laws of nature reflected God's handiwork still clung on but the discovery of relativity theory and then quantum mechanics swept all that away. Postmodernism proper begins around the first two decades of the 20th C. 'All that is solid melts into air'. 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold'. — Wayfarer

That's interesting. I agree that latter 'modern physics' could just as well be called 'postmodern physics'. Relativity de-centred the observer, embedding them in a mathematical language game (a reference frame) and insisted there was no special, objective, neutral position to judge those games (no special frames). Quantum mechanics replaced ontic objects with epistemic ones: replaced a ball rolling down an incline with 'everything we know about balls rolling down inclines', resulting in a plurality of future realities.

I'll stop here to savour us agreeing about something. It feels nice. :)

There MUST be published papers written with this thing. — hypericin

https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7

And these are science journals and proceedings, not humanities ones. Somehow this was less damning for science, which depends on s rigorous referee procedure, than for humanities papers trying to manage interdisciplinary approaches into fields it was never going to understand.

Cheers Janus. While the anti-vax lunatic fringe might disagree, I think most people would agree. By contrast, would you say that most people agree or disagree with the sentence: Our use of technology is causing a catastrophic global warming event? — Kenosha Kid

I'm really not sure about that one. I'd say anyone who is even passably science-literate and not given to perverse conspiracy theories would agree, but I don't know how many of each of those categories there are. I'd say the conspiracy theory crowd are a fairly small minority, but I don't know about the science-literate.

And I'm thinking, the period after post-modern is post-apocalypse. :yikes: Hope not. — Wayfarer

I'd say belief in/awareness of a technology-driven apocalypse is definitely part of the postmodern condition. Right now that's kind of the bookend of the postmodern era: it started with the apocalyptic vision of two world wars, it held its breath through mutually assured destruction, and now it's getting ready for irreversible destructive manmade climate change.

I was always taught (sociology, sorry) that postmodernism begins mid 20th Century, esp 1960's. I think the theory's slippery lack of specificity is telling and appropriately ironic. I guess you are trying to align it to a bigger picture. — Tom Storm

A lot of people get retrospectively relabeled as pomo or proto-pomo. It's quite common in criticism of pomo within philosophy to start at Kant. For some reason, Descartes making God an absolute necessity for objective reality was seen as secular Enlightenment, while Kant saying we can't know everything was seen as Bible-thumping. Conservative philosophers are weird.

But I think Wayfarer is right. Even if late modern physics isn't strictly pomo, it would be weird if it wasn't a major contributor.

I'd say anyone who is even passably science-literate and not given to perverse conspiracy theories would agree, but I don't know how many of each of those categories there are. I'd say the conspiracy theory crowd are a fairly small minority, but I don't know about the science-literate. — Janus

Manmade climate change's reality has an overwhelming consensus in science, so I expect that scientifically literate people would agree that our use of technology is apocalyptic. Those who disagree don't care much for scientific authority, evidence, facts, etc. One grand narrative or another falls either way.

spacetime is doomed — Tom Storm

that’s quitter talk

Manmade climate change's reality has an overwhelming consensus in science, so I expect that scientifically literate people would agree that our use of technology is apocalyptic. — Kenosha Kid

I like to imagine what science and technology, and civilization itself, would have been like absent fossil fuels.I am not one who believes that our salvation lies in scientifically advanced technology. I dislike the whole idea of gratuitous consumerism, but I also recognize that the advances in medicine, prosperity due to scientifically advanced technology made possible by cheap energy (fossil fuels) that we have enjoyed and the rampant consumer economy are all of a piece and codependent; you can't have one without the others. I don't think it would be a tragedy if humanity returns to hunter/ gatherer life.

Don't forgot that designer drugs are also dependent on crude oil. We are burning our own ability to make medicines.

There is a growing distrust in Western medicine which strikes me as one of the many modes of postmodernism. It seems to me right now that a lot of people are willing to bet their health on it.

I'd expected to have to sum over the Yeses, but it appears that people are more split between options 2 & 3 than between 1 & 2 (given that the two-thirds in favour of 1 appears pretty consistent). I'd love to hear more from the 2s and 3s. I don't think anyone has posted a comment explicitly in favour of 2.

It's true that people have lost trust in the medical industry. It is often seen as having become a puppet of so-called "big Pharma". This distrust has increased interest and confidence in "alternative" therapies. Since medicine is the one overtly scientific arena in which a great deal of personal anxiety is invested it is no wonder that it is the area of science and technology that is least trusted. That is not to say that there are not many people who still trust it implicitly, though.

Yes, plastics of course and fertilizers that are killing soils world wide are based on fossil fuels as well as many medicines.

"Self-disgust" is probably the wrong term, I agree. — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, too strong. Nevertheless, I remember from my poly sci days that some of the "natives" who got restless were not just the indig subjects in the colonies. Sometimes they were home-grown, marginalized (that's why we don't hear much about them) champions of the oppressed. They can be a real thorn in the side of their own government. They did feel disgust with it.

There MUST be published papers written with this thing. — hypericin

There were:

The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax,[1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, and specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[4][5] Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[2]

The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

Well if I understood anything at all about postmodernism then this joke should be a apt.

One day in a village somewhere the local judge invited a friend over to one of his hearings. Two people involved in a dispute turned up. One began to relate his side of the story and when he'd finished the judge calmy declared, "you're right!" It was now the second person's turn and he too gave his version of the dispute. When he was done, the judge, again without batting an eyelid, announced, "you're right!" The judge's friend was utterly bewildered by all this and said, "this is utter nonsense! they can't both be right." The judge simply looked at his friend and replied, "you're also right!" :chin: :lol:

So you're sympathetic to postmodernism?

So you're sympathetic to postmodernism? — Manuel

I think like a lot of things it's got some vital stuff and some guff, but the reason I started this thread is because of various conversations I've had with people here that showed me that what I thought was vital/guff was not what they thought was vital/guff.

I think it's difficult to separate postmodernism from its detractors, which have never struck me as thorough. I think it's also difficult to separate descriptions of pomo society from endorsements of it, hence this thread. (I'm very surprised that so many people believe that postmodern era occurred, which is an implicit agreement that some postmodern philosophy was necessary, although not necessarily the one we got.)

Mostly my feeling is that pomo was fundamentally accurate, but no one really knew what to do with it, much like existentialism which I think of as early postmodernism. A lot of it also seems to come down to matters of taste, or rather of distaste of things held beyond criticism being criticised.

In short, there's something there, and it deserves a fairer shake, both by people outside of it and by its researchers (pomo needs a better class of postmodernist).

(pomo needs a better class of postmodernist). — Kenosha Kid

I'll drink to that! :up:

Back in the day I'd found philosophical p0m0 to be an academically effete redundancy selling the news a day late and dollar short that "metanarratives, epistemes" were suspect because they – their subject Man – had been decentered. Big whup. Modernity organically grows out of the first great (though marginalized) decentering: Copernicus' Heliocentric model of the solar system, followed by (just the highlights):

• Cervantes' & Shakespeare's metafictions
• Galileo's Mediocrity Principle, Relativity & (revived) "atomism"
• Spinoza's Natura Naturans, Conatus, Affects ... & (first of a kind) biblical criticism/deconstruction
• Newton's Gravity constant (death of telelogy)
• Hume's Bundle theory of "the self", Induction problem & Is-Ought "guillotine"
• Darwin-Wallace's speciation (descent) by Natural Selection
• Boltzmann's 3rd law of thermodynamics ("heat death of the universe")
• Schopenhauer-Nietzsche's Will ("unconscious") ... genealogical method, perspectivism, etc
• political-economic anarchism (mutualist, syndicalist, libertarian communist, etc)
• Einstein's Relativity theories
• quantum uncertainty
• Gödel's Incompleteness theorems (+ Turing, Von Neumann, Chaitin, Wolfram)
• Shannon's Information entropy
• Wittgenstein's forms of life-language games-meaning is usage
• fallibilism ... falsificationism ...
• semiotics ... structuralism ...
• Chomsky's Universal Generative Grammar
• absurdism (e.g. Zapffe, Camus)
• economic democracy (stakeholder socioeconomics contra shareholder capitalism)
• Kahneman & Tverksy's cognitive biases & prospect theory

By the early '90s I'd had enough of Francophone obscurant logorrhea (looking at you Derrida et al) & the virulent Heideggerasty running through academe at the time. The worse part, in my mind, is that p0m0 sophists were refuting themselves by radically relativizing all claims including, by implication, their own, thereby disarming any intellectual resistance or operations against their perceived "logocentric" opponents. Useless. In the American context, non-Jamesian/Rortian pragmatisms + left-libertarian critiques of – alternatives to – the neoliberal, military keynesian status quo is still the only "viable" oppositional stance given that 1960s-80s p0m0 was DOA. Pathetic really. So now catastrophic climate change seems the last great "opportunity in disaster" for a transvaluation of all values and withering away of the state, otherwise ... only a Singularity can save us. :sweat:

Ah. I think part of it has to do with one's attitudes towards the Parisians: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard and so on. If this is what is meant by "pomo", then I can see the many disagreements coming in.

If you have in mind Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rorty and then you add in the novelists, then I think it's interesting.

Mostly my feeling is that pomo was fundamentally accurate, but no one really knew what to do with it, much like existentialism which I think of as early postmodernism. A lot of it also seems to come down to matters of taste, or rather of distaste of things held beyond criticism being criticised. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. But I ask you, what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism.

The taste factor is crucial, I agree.

In short, there's something there, and it deserves a fairer shake, both by people outside of it and by its researchers (pomo needs a better class of postmodernist). — Kenosha Kid

I think this is quite sensible. Perhaps David Foster Wallace was the best proponent of pomo, in terms of articulating many of its peculiarly modern concerns, in ordinary language. Not only in fiction, but also in non-fiction and in interviews as well.

Ah! So everything that has precursors is a waste of time? I'm not so sure...

Darwin is a good shout, mind, and displays his merits by still being rejected on grounds of incompatibility with that most pernicious of grand narratives, completing Copernicus's good work.

But it's interesting isn't it, that simultaneously Darwin could be a good contender for The Start of it All with his godless universe and Kant is in the running for his godfulness. The problem with pomo is very dependent on what axe needs grinding.

In reading this thread I'm beginning to see a distinction between an era and a people. The OP had me thinking merely of an era (post-modern); but subsequent posts discuss a person (a post-modernist). The latter could be a person like me, who: 1. simply thinks the era is/was real, 2. embodies the characteristics of the era; 3. embraces the characteristics of the era; or 4. merely happens to live in the era. I might be #1 and #4 but don't know enough about myself or the characteristic to know if I qualify for #2 or #3. Still reading. But I think it might be helpful to me if the distinction was made. Maybe I'll just have to struggle to discern from context.

Excellent post. :up:

what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism. — Manuel

To me that’s like asking what aspect of a present day mammal’s functioning hadnt been articulated previously by a billion year old simple invertebrate. If one wants to simplify the notion of function to an extreme degree, then one can see them as similar or even identical. But the nature of nature is to overcome itself. Both natural and cultural history is a process of endless transformation of previous structures and functions. . Postmodernism is inextricably bound to an era of the West just as biological
structures that depend on and transform precious ones are marked by their emergence in a particular era.

non-Jamesian/Rortian pragmatisms + left-libertarian critiques of – alternatives to – the neoliberal, military keynesian status quo is still the only "viable" oppositional stance given that 1960s-80s p0m0 was DOA — 180 Proof

Who are these non/Jamesian pragmatists? Certainly not Dewey or Mead. Do you mean Peirce?
And where do you stand on critical theorists like Adorno and Habermas, Badiu , Lacan, Zizek or pomo theologians like Caputo , Critchley, Charles Taylor?

And that's a fair analogy. But behind the heavy verbiage, what's new in postmodernism? If you want to say that it arose in combination with a certain type of mode of production, sure, that's fine.

And its good and sometimes useful to see the power dynamics behind prisons and psychiatry or to perhaps look at knowledge as component of markets. That was better stated and established by the development of the PR system in the early 20th century. But still, it was good work.

It's also good to analyze the various aspects of states ideology and it is also useful to point out that aboriginal people's often get left out.

But to claim that science is too "arborescent" and not rhizomatic enough or to say that what's missing from analytic philosophy is that they "do philosophy" as if nothing has happened in 20th century history, as Derrida said, or to say, as Lacan that "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.", doesn't look to me as any kind of advance at all.

So, yes, I do take issue with the verbiage and the use of legitimate scientific concepts in an illogical manner. At the same time I think some value can be found in most people.

But I don't see what's new about the thought, besides the jargon.

what's missing from analytic philosophy is that they "do philosophy" as if nothing has happened in 20th century history, as Derrida said, — Manuel

. Rorty made this argument also, meaning that most analytic philosophy was simply regurgitating Kant and hadnt absorbed Hegel’s lessons yet.

But I don't see what's new about the thought, besides the jargon. — Manuel

What’s new is that it rejects representationalism and the neo-Kantian notion of a world out there we can only approach through interpretation. Philosophical postmodernism might become clearer in you in the guise of enactive, embodied cognitivism. Zahavi would also be a good place to start.
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

Ah! So everything that has precursors is a waste of time? I'm not so sure... — Kenosha Kid

Of course not. My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. That p0m0 is "a waste of time" is a fact of its scholastic-like vacuity and sophistries (no need to name names, is there?)

I ask you, what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism. — Manuel

:up:

My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. — 180 Proof

To prove your point convincingly you would have to be able to summarize the arguments of Derrida or Foucault.