Postmodernism isn't without merits, though it can certainly be said it has been taken a bit too far as of late. Once one embraces moral relativism fully, it's difficult to be taken seriously as a human being.
You were right, I really like this post. You've compressed so much in so few words that it's like you're the giant Micromegas, from the eponymous short-story by Voltaire, the original SF story.
http://www.wondersmith.com/scifi...scifi/
micro.htm
Heh...I'm getting a degree in self-consuming hermeneutical circle-jerking.
This is probably one of your best lists yet.
My main annoyance with postmodernists is that they are interested in many of the broader issues I'm interested in: the nature of meaning, values, identity, subjectivity in the modern world. But their inadvertent (?) mission seems to be to prove the nihilist futility of all such fundamental questions, if not the ideals of knowledge and discovery in general. If the world is really as postmodernists describe it, there is no reason not to become a serial rapist heroin addict. A second annoyance is with the fact that they somehow claim Nietzsche as their intellectual forefather, even though they are exactly the kind of people Nietzsche was railing against. The depths of their ressentiment make Christianity look like the High Roman Empire. Finally the neo-Orwellian, secular theological obscurantism of their language insults the very idea of beauty in writing.
Postmodernists do have a place, I'd say, in a few limited artistic and academic arenas. There are a few postmodern authors (DeLillo, Pynchon) I've enjoyed, and the idea of hyper-reality is useful for media studies. But their totalitarian urge to dominate the entire humanities--and the sciences!--has corrupted if not destroyed entire disciplines (English and Sociology in particular). Postmodern criticisms of science are particularly hilarious. They attempt to argue that science should not be objective (!) but rather incorporate non-phallocentric, "feminine" approaches, despite the fact that they deny any genetic basis to gender, thus making them, on their own terms, propagandists for an ideologically false male-female dichotomy! I was forced to read these arguments in a class on the history of technology, and I would have dropped it then and there if it hadn't been too late to do so.
To conclude, postmodernism has become an amorphous, gellatinous blob that incorporates the remnants of every invalidated leftist pseudo-science--post-structuralism, "Marxist humanism," gender studies, psychoanalysis, "critical" theory, postcolonialism, queer theory (the theory? everything is queer), deconstructionism--in a bid to destroy the possibility of a meaningful existence and make people like me question whether the entire secular search for new values begun with Nietzsche musn't end in an even more offensive civilizational pathology than the one he diagnosed.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/
Att...the_Stockbroker
Post-modernism is a discipline based on egoism. In a post-modern novel, there can be no protagonist but the author.
I was never very good at math, but it never occurred to me to equate postmodernism with egoism. If you're at a loss of good reading material, I'd recommend you investigate my namesake.
postmodernism: a great, common sense idea that sounds increasingly stupid the more you talk about it...
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