Puck Fostmodernism
I mean, don't actually but you know.
What I specifically have a problem with regarding postmodernism is the way people have apparently gone about trying to define and categorize it as another one of history's literary movements with specific traits that all postmodern works have in common. It's fair to want to do that, considering postmodernism is a legitimate movement and difficult to understand if you don't know what you're looking for. But I don't think you have to think very hard to recognize just the general ridiculousness of postmodernism and its basic concepts.
Postmodernism is supposed to be fun. It literally surrounds everything in the world we live in. Almost every single time that I'm using my phone or laptop, I'm constantly exposed to slang, memes, and a culture of complete irony and general postmodernism. I'm not gonna spend this post trying to explain postmodernism is from my point of view, but I think you can get a sense of what I mean. So much of the humor and culture that we encounter today is minimalist, satirical, and generally making fun of everything around us. It's gotten to the point where things that aren't inherently funny are funny anyway. We've just become used to a world with a bit of nihilism, existential dread, and information shock.
And to a certain extent, we understand that. Whatever you wanna call us, the zoomers or gen-z-ers, we all have some innate knowledge of how postmodernism works. We don't need some scholarly article telling us how it's invaded the world or 400 page doctoral theses explicating why a red square counts as fine art. All of us just kind of understand the ridiculousness behind it, and we all know that there's some meaning behind it. The meaning might be stupid sometimes, but we can appreciate the stupidity.
Now when we have literary critics coming into the scene trying to explain what postmodernism is to the generation that grew up with it, we begin to have a problem. I understand that we need to have some basic method of categorizing what postmodernism is and how to understand it in a broad sense. And that's perfectly fine; we need that definition at some point, and some people legitimately need help understanding it or getting a better sense of it. Like, trying to explain postmodernism isn't inherently a bad thing.
But then we come to the readings explaining postmodernism and get sentences like this:
"Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste."
"Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability"
"We characterize the ontology of postmodernism, whether in terms of acceptance of the world or in terms of ontological indeterminacy, we are not characterizing postmodernist poetics as such but only that part of its poetics that we might call postmodernist thematics."
I don't understand 30% of the words these sentences use and I don't understand 100% of what they're saying. I really don't think it takes some thinking to realize that when explaining one of the most complicated critical movements ever, it doesn't help to talk about it in the most roundabout, complicated, "look at me I'm smart and flexing my word knowledge" ways in existence. A simple "postmodernism whack dude" would have been much better than something I would find on r/IncreasinglyVerbose.
Postmodernism is something experienced, not explained. Like, have these critics opened a computer in the past 10 years? Do they interact with normal people? Did Edward Docx talk to a teenager when he wrote an article about postmodernism in 2011? I know we've gotten more postmodern since then, but still. How the hell are people supposed to understand what it is when your writing is more confusing and incomprehensible than any postmodernism book out there?
Mr. Mitchell, I love you, but I hope you realize the garbage fire that these readings are. If I would make a suggestion: next time you're teaching about postmodernism, send the students to Reddit for a while.
Now here's a great postmodernist meme that sent me into a 10 minute laughing fit at Steak 'n Shake one time.
What I specifically have a problem with regarding postmodernism is the way people have apparently gone about trying to define and categorize it as another one of history's literary movements with specific traits that all postmodern works have in common. It's fair to want to do that, considering postmodernism is a legitimate movement and difficult to understand if you don't know what you're looking for. But I don't think you have to think very hard to recognize just the general ridiculousness of postmodernism and its basic concepts.
Postmodernism is supposed to be fun. It literally surrounds everything in the world we live in. Almost every single time that I'm using my phone or laptop, I'm constantly exposed to slang, memes, and a culture of complete irony and general postmodernism. I'm not gonna spend this post trying to explain postmodernism is from my point of view, but I think you can get a sense of what I mean. So much of the humor and culture that we encounter today is minimalist, satirical, and generally making fun of everything around us. It's gotten to the point where things that aren't inherently funny are funny anyway. We've just become used to a world with a bit of nihilism, existential dread, and information shock.
And to a certain extent, we understand that. Whatever you wanna call us, the zoomers or gen-z-ers, we all have some innate knowledge of how postmodernism works. We don't need some scholarly article telling us how it's invaded the world or 400 page doctoral theses explicating why a red square counts as fine art. All of us just kind of understand the ridiculousness behind it, and we all know that there's some meaning behind it. The meaning might be stupid sometimes, but we can appreciate the stupidity.
Now when we have literary critics coming into the scene trying to explain what postmodernism is to the generation that grew up with it, we begin to have a problem. I understand that we need to have some basic method of categorizing what postmodernism is and how to understand it in a broad sense. And that's perfectly fine; we need that definition at some point, and some people legitimately need help understanding it or getting a better sense of it. Like, trying to explain postmodernism isn't inherently a bad thing.
But then we come to the readings explaining postmodernism and get sentences like this:
"Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste."
"Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability"
"We characterize the ontology of postmodernism, whether in terms of acceptance of the world or in terms of ontological indeterminacy, we are not characterizing postmodernist poetics as such but only that part of its poetics that we might call postmodernist thematics."
I don't understand 30% of the words these sentences use and I don't understand 100% of what they're saying. I really don't think it takes some thinking to realize that when explaining one of the most complicated critical movements ever, it doesn't help to talk about it in the most roundabout, complicated, "look at me I'm smart and flexing my word knowledge" ways in existence. A simple "postmodernism whack dude" would have been much better than something I would find on r/IncreasinglyVerbose.
Postmodernism is something experienced, not explained. Like, have these critics opened a computer in the past 10 years? Do they interact with normal people? Did Edward Docx talk to a teenager when he wrote an article about postmodernism in 2011? I know we've gotten more postmodern since then, but still. How the hell are people supposed to understand what it is when your writing is more confusing and incomprehensible than any postmodernism book out there?
Mr. Mitchell, I love you, but I hope you realize the garbage fire that these readings are. If I would make a suggestion: next time you're teaching about postmodernism, send the students to Reddit for a while.
Now here's a great postmodernist meme that sent me into a 10 minute laughing fit at Steak 'n Shake one time.
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| For more great memes like this, go to r/antimeme here |
Edit: Sorry if it seems like I'm attacking Mr. Mitchell. I genuinely really like his classes and the structure of the course. This is mainly just me ranting about these critics claiming to know what postmodernism is and then spending 30 pages and an hour of my life not explaining anything. None of this is meant to be an attack on you Mr. Mitchell. I'm sorry if it came off as rude :/
Interesting points. It feels like these "scholarly articles" and whatnot that try to explain postmodernism are just overcomplicating things. These writers seem to know postmodernism pretty well, but are overanalyzing it in an attempt to explain it to someone who doesn't (which ironically doesn't help with understanding the movement at all). As you suggest, looking at some memes for a couple minutes is a much better way to learn about postmodernism than reading these passages.
ReplyDeleteSo while I agree that we can recognize postmodernism when we see it, I really don't think it's fair to dismiss critical theory as something that you would see on r/iamverysmart or /increasinglyverbose. Yes, it looks like that, but so does any scientific or engineering paper if you don't know the jargon of the field. And that's what the essays we read communicate in: jargon. It's specific technical language that does make it hard to read, but also allows for more accuracy when speaking to other people in the field. And we're not experts in that, so it makes it harder to read, but not impossible.
ReplyDeleteTake this passage from a different field: "I start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—and therefore of the biopolitical. Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged normative theories of democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty." This also sounds like incomprehensible nonsense when you look at it at first, with words you recognize, but combined in ways which seem to obscure the meaning. But if you read the rest of the essay (Mbembe's Necropolitics), that passage begins to make more sense, and the rest of the essay begins to provide a really fascinating insight into elements of modern politics. The words used to explain postmodernism are complicated because postmodernism itself is complicated, and so the writers go looking for words which very specifically pin down the feelings brought on by looking at things like r/antimeme or /imsorryjohn.
Take the middle quote there "Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability". You could rewrite that as "if you're never entirely sure what your place in the world is, and you don't think you'll ever figure it out, you start wondering about what the nature of the world actually is, or if there are multiple", but it ends up taking twice as much space, and requires the sentence to focus on a 'you', instead of on the concepts themselves.
I see your point. In our class discussions, when Mr. Mitchell asked us to find examples of post-modernism, we were drawing on what we see on the internet, and essentially the culture we’re immersed in every day. And from that perspective, reading these articles of hyper-intellectual theory trying to map out postmodernism feels out of place. Trying to connect this scholarly jargon about literary movements to our own experiences of postmodernism – such as your great Dora meme or anything on Reddit, literally the least scholarly things I can think of – feels absurd.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree with Sasha and actually thought the McHale readings made really good points buried in complex language (albeit, good points that took me a few weeks to actually wrap my head around), I do see how our generation’s innate understanding of postmodernist humor doesn’t always seem to gel with having actual intellectual discussions about it.
We maybe tilted too far in the direction of citing examples of postmodernist culture entering the mainstream in our class discussions--it is a lot more accessible and generally more fun to marvel at meme culture or the ubiquity of irony or YouTube than to grapple with the real and serious philosophical discussions that underpin postmodernism. I may be guilty of chickening out from engaging the difficult stuff in these readings and going for the crowd-pleaser in our early discussions. But the point of citing all these examples of postmodernism in pop culture today is to underline Docx's point that what had once been radical innovations have now become commonplace--no one is freaked out by metafiction anymore; irony doesn't undermine high seriousness in any potent way, high and low culture are blended all the time, and no one gets upset. People used to complain to me that they had no idea what postmodernism is, as if it's so esoteric and impossible to understand, and I wanted to make the point that you all already are pretty familiar with it.
ReplyDeleteI would not want you to conclude from these conversations that postmodernism doesn't entail some very important and necessarily complex philosophical and cultural insights, even if now these are things your generation takes for granted. For just one incredibly significant example, the postmodernist concept of gender as a socially constructed category that can be "performed" along a wide spectrum of identities has taken hold to a remarkable degree. (I used to have to spend way too much time introducing the *idea* that gender is a performance and social construction rather than a universal biological category anytime this stuff came up in class, and half the group would still be perplexed and resistant.) And cultural reactionary forces *still* see postmodernism as an unwelcome or "politically correct" intrusion into the traditions that have repressed people for generations--take a look at any of the absurd "bathroom bills" that have appeared in state legislatures in an effort to oppress transgender people, and you'll see that, while some of these principles are commonplace for you, there's still a lot of cultural work to do in terms of postmodernist ideas of gender taking hold. The same could be said of ideas about race and cultural identity.
So there is a very real and serious underpinning to these discussions, and yes, academic philosophers and critical theorists do tend to articulate these ideas in sometimes daunting and jargon-laden prose. (It gets a LOT worse than McHale, trust me!) This kind of stuff is pretty much never introduced at the high school level, for good reason--and maybe I'm nuts for even assigning it to you. But I don't know if you could get a working sense of what is meant by ontology or suspicion toward metanarratives from Reddit alone. Irony can be fun (I indulge sometimes myself, when the mood is right!), but it can also keep us from saying anything serious or consequential about anything. And, while it can be hard to see sometimes, postmodernism has been saying important, serious, and consequential things about all kinds of social constructions for decades now. The fact that we don't always see these insights as so controversial today, in our academic-liberal bubble, is one measure of its success.
I definitely agree with this post. I understand the value in scholarly sources or academic writings, but I did not like reading it and feeling like I was drudging through something way above my head. I remember dreading the days where readings from the Course Packet were assigned, because I knew I would struggle. I felt like I got nothing out of those sources, even after classroom explanations. That said, the class room discussions were very helpful, I just don't think the readings contributed much if anything to that. If we are going to read those texts and derive meaning from them, I think we need to spend time in class going over them in a very "hold my hand" while i stumble sort of way. (Disclaimer: I don't hate the class or Mr. Mitchell or anything, I just don't like not understanding what I am reading at all)
ReplyDelete