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The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006)
- ThomPete 8y agoPostmodernism is the final philosophical analysis You cant dig deeper than the very language we use to philosophize with. Every attempt at undoing postmodernism will get you right back at the postmodern realization. So very much alive at least philosophically but we are also starting to realize this in other areas.
- goatlover 8y agoOr you can stop making philosophy an exercise in linguistic analysis. Language is the tool we use to ask questions with, not the things we are asking about.
- ThomPete 8y agoBut asking those questions bring you right back at defining them. We can ignore it just like we can ignore quantum physics talking about classical physics but that just mean we are ignoring them and reducing the discussion into a frame of reference which is exactly the point of postmodernism.
- goatlover 8y agoI don't think any interesting questions boil down to agreeing on a dictionary definition. Say you could get everyone to agree on the same definition for free will or consciousness. You're still left with the same questions about to what extent do we have defined free will and subjective experiences, which people will still disagree and debate on. Unless you get people to agree on definitions that define the problem away, but then you're just going to be using a different definition to pose the question that came up, because it will keep coming up. Language is just a tool to express ourselves. It's not the fabric of existence.
- ThomPete 8y agoBesides personal experience of phenomena what other way do you express your philosphical inquiry in? The dictionary isnt the point here, postmodernism isnt concerned about that. Its actually a critique of exactly that.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoIt's not about agreeing on some dictionary definition. The exercise is semantic in the sense that it seeks to describe and then connect sets of concepts to sets of beliefs in certain contexts. So in that sense, it's analytically deep. However what tends to happen is that most casual students get to a certain depth in PM, say undergraduate level, give up on the complexity and then throw their hands up and say "nothing is real so I can create my won world that you need to conform to." That's the problem.
- moolcool 8y agoThat comes with the implication that everything in classical physics is a solved problem though. Just because you can distill anything to meta-questions doesn't mean you should, or that it's (necessarily) a productive exercise for your application. You can build an engine without pondering the nature of iron atoms
- ThomPete 8y agoYou can but philosophically you cant without creating some sort of frame of reference. Scientific discoveries are not philosphical truths they are something else.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoBut that's a dead end. In Francis Schaeffer's phrase, in postmodernism "language leads to language and nothing more" (emphasis added).
- roenxi 8y agoBut in practice we can clearly define some things objectively. If that were truly impossible, we would be unable to share common languages to any degree and it would be impossible for two separate cultures to communicate. At some level reality itself may be an illusion and we can never be sure of time and space. However, if we concede that point, then we concede that potentially nothing exists then we cannot debate it because we don't exist either. So even by discussing a matter we are taking an assumption that we exist and that something exists for us to talk about, even if the precise meaning of the words isn't nailed down by anyone. At this point, postmodernism starts to look a bit weak, because to communicate we must assume some shared reality between two parties which is quite possibly going to be objective by both parties standards. And in the framework of human endevour, there are a huge number of hypothetical realities we have ruled out by scientific experiment. It is overwhelmingly likely at this point that something objective exists and we've narrowed in on it quite a bit from, say, 10,000 BC.
- ThomPete 8y agoWe can define things to a good enough degree that its useful but its still a reduction of reality.
- cirgue 8y agoReally, it all comes back to “am I just a hallucinating brain in a vat?” But the answer to that question doesn’t much matter really. If that’s the case, why not just pack up all the books and go to the beach? Same thing with language. It’s one interesting line of inquiry, but it’s hardly the only one worth discussing.
- ThomPete 8y agoThat depends on how deep your philosophical inquiry is.
- aphextron 8y ago>Or you can stop making philosophy an exercise in linguistic analysis. Language is the tool we use to ask questions with, not the things we are asking about. "The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
- zepto 8y agoPerhaps that is just wrong.
- dwaltrip 8y agoA large portion of my thought is very much non-linguistic. Visuospatial thoughts are the easiest example. This even happens for things that aren't inherently spatial, like abstract concepts, if there is a useful spatial metaphor.
- ThomPete 8y agoThoughts yes, now try and express those thoughts to get me to agree and you will understand what we are talkingabout.
- dwaltrip 8y agoWill a wink suffice? How about a photograph or a song? Edit: Language is fascinating, of course. However, I find the underlying mental layers that support it to be equally fascinating, if not more so.
- ThomPete 8y agoAre they claims about the world or just expressions?
- omginternets 8y agoWhat's the difference?
- sien 8y agoAnother thing about some form of linguistic analysis being the final form of philosophy is that another form of linguistic analysis, that of Wittgenstein, predates Postmodernism by 50 years. In addition that Existentialism is after Wittgenstein's take on a analysis. Existentialism attempts to answer the questions that we care about such as how we live our lives and our own values. Existential philosophy is also, in part, very readable opposed to the great difficulty of reading Postmodernism.
- avs733 8y agoYou can look at intent and honesty. The metamodernism stuff is confusing but interesting
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago> Postmodernism is the final philosophical analysis. Hardly. There are plenty of psychoanalytical models (still being) explored that have more utility and the inevitable philosophies that extend from them will be just as final. The tools of measure are the roots of modern philosophy and postmodernism is little more than an ancient narrative about behavior that sprouts from mass media.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tzahola 8y agoSo it’s like bedrock in minecraft.
- forapurpose 8y ago> Postmodernism is the final philosophical analysis You cant dig deeper than the very language we use to philosophize with. Every attempt at undoing postmodernism will get you right back at the postmodern realization. So very much alive at least philosophically but we are also starting to realize this in other areas. I've thought about it in similar ways, but I fear those are the words of the incumbent facing the disrupter (if you'll pardon an abused analogy). What you say is true if you start with the premise of the postmodernist. That is, in effect I see it as saying nothing more complicated than postmodernism is the outcome of postmodernist assumptions. Typically, the disrupter has a different agenda, different goals entirely, which is why the incumbent can't understand them - it makes no sense in the context of the incumbent's goals. In this case, the agenda, the assumption, of postmodernism is a desire for the truth (which can't be had) or as realistic an understanding of it as possible. An hypothesis, stealing a bit from the article: The psuedo-modernist, to use the word from the article, doesn't care about the truth, so all your postmodernism is in the trash. Their reality is whatever they create or believe in the moment. It's fake news, fake economics, fake science (climate denial), whatever is in their Facebook feed, whatever their sources or friends repeat over and over, whatever is said most loudly or with the most anger - whatever can be insisted upon - whatever makes you angry. (Remember when anger was a sign of irrationality? Now it's a sign of a new reality being created.) All authoritative sources are destroyed, including all work product of academia (if you believe some HN comments). Propaganda is reality, and to an extent that is true: Perception is reality, and people can maintain those delusions for a long time. (And yeah, that's pretty scary.) "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick (though I've never verified its provenience)
- ThomPete 8y agoWe can't know the truth but we can be it.
- sien 8y agoExcept that Wittgenstein and much of Analytic Philosophy was already there 75 years ago and was largely ignored by Foucault, Derrida and others. Wittgenstein is all about trying to work out how language works. Postmodernism combines Nietzsche and Marx and then looks at text but ignores people who had been looking at text philosophically for decades.
- ThomPete 8y agoI don't think Wittgenstein was ignored (especially not his later work) they just had different goals. You could equally claim that all postmodern philosophy is really just Zen Buddhism reinterpreted. I don't think it takes anything away from anyone.
- sien 8y agoHowever, since there was a significant form of textual analysis that predates Postmodernism it shows that forms of textual analysis have had later philosophical movements. It also shows that Postmodernism itself is the second form of textual analysis in recent times which indicates that it is unlikely to be the final form of philosophy. The other point about Postmodernism is that while texts are meant to be reinterpreted in any way the reality is that shallow readings of who the author was and what they like to do in the bedroom has been the primary result.
- ThomPete 8y agoNot it doesent show that. The “conclusions” are more or less the same and non have had further developments inside their respective frameworks. I.e there isnt any critique of postmodernism that takes it further only back, there isnt any critique of zenbuddism that takes it further etc.
- ThomPete 8y agoWhy the downvotes? Arent we just having a discussion?
- kazagistar 8y agoUpvotes and downvotes are part of the discussion. If we didn't want them to be, we wouldn't use those parts of the internet that have these verbs to have our discussions.
- ThomPete 8y agoWe don't have downvotes for disagreement. The guidelines clearly point that out.
- detaro 8y agoThey do not. Reddit has that rule, HN doesn't. (and old statements from moderators saying it's ok)
- ThomPete 8y agoCan you point to that statement cause that seems contrary to establishing a civilized debate? You downvote if something as an example is of topic or inflamatory or otherwise destroyes the conversation, not something you disagree with which is part of the discussion. Never heard it was ok to downvote just because you disagree but would love to see the statement about that.
- myWindoonn 8y agoHi! I want to demonstrate a tenet of postmodernism. I'm wondering whether you'd agree with the following paragraph, even though my words aren't your words: You and I are exchanging words right now. Those words don't really mean anything. Meanings are private to each mind, and everybody decodes words and interprets them as having different meanings. Those meanings, or perhaps those concepts, within each mind will give rise to some sort of worldview (or POV for short) which gives everybody their own uniquely-colored glasses through which the world's stage, players, narratives, and behaviors appear filtered, giving rise to new meanings and possibilities. This paragraph was hand-written and spontaneous, but I think that you'd nonetheless agree with it because it is an attempt to capture common societal ideas about how English encodes meanings, and thus I think that most English-speakers will decode it to predictable concepts, and I think further that folks who have studied philosophy, not just postmodernism, will find concepts in it similar to the concepts that I've imagined. Why this is fascinating: I think that this understanding of language decoding as a strange loop is totally overlooked by this crowd, but it could completely overhaul how giants in the field are read, in particular Hofstadter.
- ThomPete 8y agoWe exchange words that we learned the meaning of both literally (by dictionary) and by concept (by meaning). We both are brough up in a context where we understand the meaning of "the desktop" as a metaphor for computer UI unless (unless you haven't learned that then you think it's the other physical desktop) See https://medium.com/swlh/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-computers-9feadc741f7f https://medium.com/swlh/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-... where I explore that. In other words, we are using language as a way to communicate experiences of phenomena (an apple or a painting or a movie) but our experiences will never be exactly the same and we will never be referring to exactly the same but it's good enough statistically to be "a pattern" So yeah I guess I agree if I understand you correctly.
- vixen99 8y ago“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” ― Roger Scruton
- ThomPete 8y agoThis is just a re-writing of "if you say there is no truth then what you say isn't true" But that's missing the larger point which is that perhaps we shouldn't look at things as being true or false but instead useful. In other words "there is no truth" is, of course, neither true nor false but just a perspective that's useful (just like believing in truth can be). I am fine with the incompleteness of this perspective (i.e. it's never fully resolved) and I would argue that philosophically there is no way around it (I can take any claim you make about truth and deconstruct it) and show that it's based on an apriori frame of reference. So you have to think about it differently than "Truth" to understand the point of postmodernism.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoBut go back to forapurpose's post (parallel to vixen99's). If people genuinely believe that truth isn't the point, would you not see the behavior that forapurpose describes?
- ThomPete 8y agoNo, because you don't need truth to build useful assumptions about the world.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoBut the way that plays out in politics is like this: If I don't have truth, I can't persuade others that their position is wrong. So I have to try to persuade them that their position is less useful. But in the world of politics, that itself is a truth claim. So I'm reduced to "what's useful for advancing my team". And it turns out that fake news, outright lies, and constant propaganda are useful for that. (Postmodernism doesn't recognize the possibility of real truth. Does it recognize that some things are still lies?) In practice, therefore, postmodernism turns out to be rather destructive in its effect on the political system. One might even say that, in this area, postmodernism is not useful, at least in terms of the system as a whole.
- iron0012 8y agoRight? It's so weird that the dudes that rail against postmodernism fundamentally fail to understand that it's not a single assertive ideology, it's just a simple observation of the way things are in the world around us. It's not like anybody has ever set out to "make postmodernism happen", it's just a condition that has arisen via historical consequence. So when people attack "postmodernists", it's like--you realize that these philosophers did not "create" postmodernism, right? They just describe what they're seeing in the world.
- taneq 8y agoI've always found the term "postmodern" amusing, it's kind of like the way we refer to spandex, tinfoil spacesuits, blinkenlights computers and cardboard-box robots as "futuristic".
- abiox 8y ago'modernism' is/was a (poorly named) philo-artistic 'movement'. postmodernism just refers to a movement that came into existence (or at least into fashion) after modernism. it's at least as old as the 50s or 60s.
- taneq 8y agoWell, yeah, and 'futuristic' refers to what we thought the future would look like in the 70s.
- abiox 8y agoi guess i just don't follow how you're connecting these notions.
- ahartmetz 8y agoNah, futuristic style from the 70s is called retrofuturistic. There used to be a bar in that 70s space age style in Berlin, sadly it seems to have closed.
- jhbadger 8y agoMaybe not exactly the term "futuristic", but "space age" in the sense of "space age design" certainly means 1960s/1970s style even if we are still technically in the space age.
- shpx 8y agoIn a similar vein, I'm against calling things neo-something or "New Something". There's too many old cities still called some variant of "New City" like Novgorod (founded 882 years ago), Naples (founded as Neapolis in the 7th century BC), and Carthage (founded in the 13th or 9th century BC).
- schuyler2d 8y agoWhile I agree with most of their analysis, I acknowledge that this reads basically like a "Grumpy Old Postmodernist" Something the OP doesn't dive into much but I found myself wondering is that the "pseudo-modern" label is artificial. It seems like an important aspect of the post-post-modern culture/philosophy is that it's uncoalesced -- no one starts/joins a successful movement of self conscious difference (haha or differance) from post modernism. So it's left to the grumpy olds to start making names
- trophycase 8y agoSeems like it is reaching. Core postmodern concepts like the hyperreal and simulacra are more relevant and true than they have ever been. Furthermore, the article claims that postmodern is characterized by an ironic self awareness, and never has this idea been more prominent in culture. In recent years I have noticed that TV commercials have become more and more self-aware. Take for example a recent commercial by what I believe was Verizon. It says something like "More coverage, more data." and then another actor comes into screen saying "and more people saying more." If this isn't ironic self awareness, I'm not sure what is. Those are postmodern concepts about culture. But the postmodern metaphysical and epistemological nihilism are, as another commenter said, basically bedrock in terms of philosophy.
- syntaxfree 8y agoPeople often take postmodern theory to be prescriptive and agitate against it -- when it is actually descriptive and sorely needed. Where existent theory is flawed, it needs improvement. But the world is going to keep going where it's going...
- aphextron 8y ago>Furthermore, the article claims that postmodern is characterized by an ironic self awareness, and never has this idea been more prominent in culture. In recent years I have noticed that TV commercials have become more and more self-aware. Take for example a recent commercial by what I believe was Verizon. It says something like "More coverage, more data." and then another actor comes into screen saying "and more people saying more." If this isn't ironic self awareness, I'm not sure what is. I think that perfectly proves the author's point, though. The "self awareness" of postmodernism has filtered to even the most banal of sources and been left in the dust by the avant garde of today. Irony and sarcasm as critical devices are dead for anyone but the hacks. From the article: >"people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park – but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children’s cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights."
- DonHopkins 8y agoOne of my favorite pieces of deconstructive criticism: http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html How To Deconstruct Almost Anything My Postmodern Adventure By Chip Morningstar, June 1993. "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
- forapurpose 8y agoI've been mourning postmodernism and wondering at the cause of death and at what has or will replace it. I think postmodernism has the answers to much of what plagues society today, and in fact I wonder if the plague may be due to its loss. In a world of overwhelming information and especially fake information, a strong belief in the "elusiveness of meaning and knowledge" and of doubt in anyone possessing an ultimate truth, and the high degree of skepticism that results, would seem essential - a pre-Internet philosophy that seems tailor-made for the Internet era. Instead, people seem to be embracing ideology (ultimate truths), self-importance (another ultimate truth, rather than 'ironic self-awareness') and whatever claims can be insisted upon rather than supported through reason and fact; they are abandoning skepticism and reason, and the project of the Enlightenment entirely. I would ask what they see as the solution to this flood of lies and deception, but I'm afraid their answer will be that they don't care.[0] I was at a lunch with someone I hadn't spoken to in years, an English lit academic whose PhD was about a post-modern author; one of their co-workers sat between us. I mentioned reading something related to their dissertation; to my surprise, my friend was clearly embarrassed; they said 'I don't read those things any more'. Other PhDs I know have abandoned intellectualism as fervently as the 'psuedo-modernists'; they buy into the ideology and fake news du jour too. If not them, then who? (When I mentioned this to a sympathetic academic, they said 'they aren't intellectuals; they're just a medieval guild'.) I want to ask: Why did academics and intellectuals abandon post-modernism? Why has everyone else? How can they knowingly lie to themselves and accept the misinformation as truth? What do they think will replace it? How do they intend to solve these problems without it? [0] To avoid redundancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361122
- scarecrowbob 8y agoI generally know what you're talking about; it meets with my experiences with fellow academic refugees. I quite a Lit PhD well into my dissertation and writers like Lyotard figured heavily in my MA thesis. But there's not a lot of use in talking about anything like this stuff in general conversation. Groups of people get exposed to something a little bit, someone smugly tells them that the emperor has no clothes, and it quickly becomes more enjoyable for them to use that tiny bit of smugness to dismiss rich and useful lines of thought. At a certain point, there isn't much to say to people who have developed an allergy to certain kinds of terms, analysis, and lines of thought.
- woodandsteel 8y agoPostmodernism is a variation on Plato's allegory of the cave. The idea is that everyone is living in a world of total illusion, but the philosopher will, though a very unconventional intellectual process, discover the really real, and then use his understanding to bring about a utopia. For postmodernist, the intellectual process is deconstruction and critical thought, and the utopia is sort of multicultural but radically individualistic world, and the replacement of capitalism with some sort of vague socialism. However, postmodernists don't really believe in their claimed radical perspectivism. So for instance, when there is a dispute between peasants claim they are starving and beaten down, and the wealthy landholders claim the peasants are doing just great, they think the peasants are objectively correct and the landholders are just plain wrong. Postmodernism came about because Marxism had come to a political dead end, and so leftist types in France decided to try to use Nietzschean relativism as a way to undermine liberal realism, in hopes it would somehow lead to their desired utopia. This doesn't make much philosophical sense, since Nietzsche was militantly anti-socialist, and as a political strategy it has been an utter failure.
- keithnz 8y agoI don't think so, platos point was that the shadows were poor representations of real objective things. By moving beyond the cave, you can see the real objective thing. post modernsim says, nah, your objective things aren't objective, you just found some "shadows" that look prettier to you. I think pseduo modernisim is a bit more more like the cave, a sort of acknowledgement that there are real objective things but the shadows are things in and of themselves. Except these are special shadows that can produce brilliant colorful holograms, and these fancy shadows are also interesting things, in fact they can make life super interesting. But somehere in these shadows there is some kind of objective reality.
- woodandsteel 8y ago>I don't think so, platos point was that the shadows were poor representations of real objective things. By moving beyond the cave, you can see the real objective thing. post modernsim says, nah, your objective things aren't objective, you just found some "shadows" that look prettier to you. I agree, that is why I said it is a variation on Plato's cave, not a simple repetition. What they have in common is the belief that what seems real in experience is in fact not, and that to arrive at an understanding of the true state of affairs requires a complex intellectual process that is radically different from ordinary thinking. Contrast all this with, for instance, Aristotle.
- DrImplausible 8y ago"Modernity died at the gates of Auschwitz", which is the Lyotard quote that I usually bust out when trying to explain Postmodernism to undergrads. Even though it isn't entirely true. It probably died at Verdun and the Somme. But the point is that the end result of the project of modernity had resulted in the development of the means of atrocity, of automatic mass death and holocaust, and the only sane move in that instance was to put it aside and move past it. Hence: "post". Coupled with the burgeoning theories from physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty, and the rest, and the idea that perhaps we not on as solid a foundation as we thought, and the time was ripe for moving on to new ways of thinking about the world.
- Lanz 8y agoPostmodernism has run its course. It's become clear that while it provides a deconstructive lens for academics, it provides a destructive one to society.
- lainga 8y agoA lens through which all things are relative... except for some sort of vaguely progressive socialism, which is always right.
- tmeasday 8y agoExcept the lens itself of course! Epistemological relativism is self refuting, I don't get how people can internalise the self-contradiction.
- myWindoonn 8y agoIt's not our fault that society can't bear to look at itself in a mirror. Postmodernism broadly consists of only two tools. The first, as you mentioned, is the deconstructive POV, the ability to look at an object as-is and to understand its origin, its design, its footguns, its flawed narrative, its social excuses, its secret hatreds. But there's more. We also get the curse of relativity, the understanding that all epistemic sources are relative and that we ultimately choose to believe what we believe. This was definitely frustrating, coming on the heels of modernism, and that's why postmodernism has its name: modernism is clearly wrong and serves only to mislead and enslave via narrative control. But in return, we get something good: Concepts can become relativized too, and so we get many simple metaphysical statements as ways to understand what things are. What is a proof? Well, it's whatever convinces you that something is true. We lose absolute proof, but each of us gain a deeper understanding of what it means to prove something to somebody. What is art? Well, it's an expression in some medium. We lose art galleries, but now we can be artistic just by expressing ourselves any time we find new media, such as video games or graffiti or atomic layer deposition or selfies. We get another good thing: A more precise understanding of how the various pieces of knowledge fit together. By talking of theories and evidence and logic as objects in their own rights, rather than as absolute facets of the universe, we can connect the various sciences and reunify the entire philosophical endeavor under a single umbrella, just like Quine always wanted with his semantic web of science. Maths is logic is metaphysics. [0] Edit: Formatting, examples. [0] https://philpapers.org/archive/ALVLIM-3.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALVLIM-3.pdf
- jancsika 8y ago> To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Gotta be kidding me. Is there a clickbait algorithm that is luring writers to mythologize Derrida et al as titans of a bygone era in academia? Seriously-- other than the Wachowskis, name one important figure who was influenced by Baudrillard...
- basicplus2 8y agoThis says it all.. "Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future. The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert."
- golergka 8y ago> Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener So, it's essentially gaming, right?
- iron0012 8y agoGood observation, gaming is absolutely a post-modern phenomenon. Any creative works with which audience actively engage and interact (rather than just observe)--and especially those that by necessity require the audience's engagement, or blur the line between the creator and the audience--are by nature post-modern.
- 3rdAccount 8y agoThere's a long article from Larry Wall (Perl's inventor) on Perl being Postmodern. It was probably the first time I saw it explained as such. An interesting talk even if you don't like Perl much: http://wall.org/~larry/pm.html http://wall.org/~larry/pm.html
- 52-6F-62 8y agoThis is a great talk. I started reading it on the bus on the way into work. It actually made me look at Perl differently. I kind of understand the reasoning behind the syntax I hated so much for so long. Now I kind of want to learn it... funny thing.
- 3rdAccount 8y agoI'm in a similar boat. I hated it too until I learned it was supposed to be the Unix language of choice that sits between needing Bash/Awk/Sed & C/C++. At that point the odd conventions and philosophy make more sense. I still use Python most of the time for my scripting needs, but am glad I can switch to Perl every now and then when I need it. The one liners are great too for terminal work.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI can see that. Especially the image of the girders and ductwork showing really resonated. I would have been more suspicious of him just being a good salesperson if he wasn't a great programmer. It's on my todo list, now.
- rusk 8y ago"Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble." Frighteningly prescient.
- chubs 8y agoPerhaps people began seeing postmodernism's deconstruction of beauty, love, soul, and truth as too stark to endure.
- dalbasal 8y agoA lot of abstract concepts degrade as they age. My take on it is that they start as a sort of art. Name things. Get big abstract points across. Shift attention from one thing to another. Use a different perspective lens. Enlightenment era "rationalism," for example. When it's an eye opening perspective, we will adopt the whole system of thought. Then, leaks in the abstraction start to become obvious. Does Hegelian reasoning (to get meta) really have three distinct phases. What about these examples over here, that seem to have four or two. If the abstraction/ideology has been built upon, and those ideas are now important to the integrity of subsequent ideas then, most likely, we'll try to fix the underlying theory. Generally, what we do is keep the labels, but change/augment their meaning. "Workers State" has an increasingly nuanced & technical meaning, depending on how long it's been since Marx said it. So does net neutrality. So does liberal democracy, rule of law, Agile... "From now on, we're doing Agile"" has the exact opposite implications in 2018 then it did in 2003. Postmodernism, as a word, has been at that stage for while. It's too much work patching the damn thing. It obscures more than it informs. Generally, instead of describing something using the word postmodernism (or one of its many associated terms) it will be easier and better to just explain things directly.
- maldusiecle 8y agoUnconvincing, from start to finish--and what a poor start! Yes, the obvious texts in courses on postmodernism are a few decades old; it takes time for things to filter into the academy. It would be easy to argue for more recent authors like Bolano, David Foster Wallace, Eugenides, or Zadie Smith as examples of postmodern fiction. Step outside literature and it's even more blatant. Kanye West, the high-grossing Marvel movies, prestige TV--these can be, and often are, read as postmodern. But rather than pick apart at cultural examples, I want to take issue with a more central claim: "The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception." This is not an uncontroversial claim. Theorists like Fredric Jameson describe postmodernism as precisely a change in material conditions. I don't have space to describe all of Jameson's arguments here, but I'd encourage anyone curious about the shift from modernism to postmodernism to look into them. They're more robust and convincing than this article, for sure.