Psotmodernism started as a typo and came to represent a much more accurate descriptive word of the post-modernism I was supposed to pay attention to as an academic in post-Marxist, post-structuralist academe. It probably represented too, the amount I had to drink to stand being in university culture at all. I wasn't used to non- scientific academics and really only learned that I mostly don't want to get used to them. One can say anything irrelevant in postmodernism, though there is no need as electronic text-engines can do this for you. Some have said the whole thing was just about being able to say something vague about politics, irrelevant to all other than the chattering gibbons who had found this particularly comfortable niche, a bit like the real thing that lives in mass numbers on a high Ethiopian plateau. I lived among them only as an ethnologist.
I actually rather like Lyotard. It is his work (from 1979 and I think written in French for the Canadian government) that is used as some kind of holy text to define postmodernism as 'incredulity towards metanarratives', though in the text and forgotten, this phrase is preceded by 'oversimplifying to the extreme', not itself a term we might easily accept in definition. Much academic citation is just copying, the original text often never read. Another classic of this is to cite 'Wittgenstein 1953' as the reference for his language- games. The reliable English translation came out in 1958. The postmodernism of Lyotard provokes us to think about 'legitimation' and its collapse. It is not a 'time' in the sense of an era, but a methodology or better 'moment of sublimation' that precedes modernism in that free-thinking that divorces thought from the biological and allows anything to go. A little perhaps, like the unfreezing-testing- refreezing put forward in management classes on creative thinking. The term 'metanarrative' is problematic. Casting this pearl before student swine you can almost hear their thoughts - "we'd better not ask the old drone about that, or we'll never get to lunch". I have, in fact, never really know what it does mean. No one asks, not least those pretending to know. Marxism was supposed to be one, yet this was only true amongst those who missed the point that we need the conditions of material existence under constant review. God and religion generally seem to be about others, yet one needs the kind of religion which asserts the authority of god for this to be true. Science might be another, yet one needs here those who assert that science should be a way of life, rather than just part of one. I'm pretty sure people use all kinds of pretty insane dross to legitimate their decisions and actually hide what their metanarratives are or operate blissfully unaware of them. Most of us in here would utterly condemn a recent case In Bangladesh in which "Islam" has been used to justify giving 101 lashes to a woman inconsiderate enough to allow herself to get pregnant during a rape and to pardon the rapist. No nonsense in reply that this isn't Islam or that I raise the issue in any way as anti-Islamic. This just isn't the rational point. We can all condemn this kind of nonsense and should - but how and why is this right? One can ask similar questions about how we can and have 'legitimated' the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and any of the history of 'empire' around the world). The rational questions concern how we legitimate our actions and whether we can really agree an authority-set underlying what spews out in our apparent disagreements. I don't care what most people in here think, as I can detect common interests in peace, fairness, justice and so on. What is thought, what is private practice amongst such people is their affair as mine is mine. The questions are about what we can socially establish, perhaps a wider version of this living in peace, the structuring of freedom, what we can limit by legitimate authority, even if this is not absolute, but a set of guidelines we accept that may be defeasible and certainly should be regarded as such. What we lack is an honest politics and I suspect this is because we lack sufficient understanding of why we do things. This in turn I believe supports the interests of power, whether in the grim decision in Bangladesh or whatever made Blair take us into a war based on lies that he will be 'justifying' on the basis of undisclosed, secret 'evidence' presented to him in a manner that must stay hidden from public scrutiny. Rational argument about such matters might spell out just what mystical metanarratives are really in play that remain unsaid in our most dismal actions. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en.
