Michael Hoover wrote: > > as my friend bobbie likes to say: there are no truths except for > *apparent* fact that there are no truths... >
As I said, I don't use the term and hence feel no obligation to define it. But one does not have to read very far to discover that the number of essays which posit a radical nominalism (explicitly or implicitly) has greatly increased over the last 40 years. That is another way of saying "there are no truths except for *apparent* fact that there are no truths..." The long passage from the Intro to _Bodies that Matter_ (which Doug loves to quote) is one instance of that nominalism. One result is that there is a lot of thinking which operates on the premise that anything implies anything (hence the ease with which Butler & Wojtek get radically different conclusions from the same premise). Whether that is postmodernism or not I do not know. There is also (though this is not particularly more characteristic of the present than of, say, the 1880s) a large literature of which one can say, "There is much that is true and much that is new, but that which is new is not true and that which is true is not new." But as I say, that seems to be the case in most periods of modernism -- which I define as all thought grounded in a superstitious or reductionist belief in the existence of the abstrct individual, existing autonomously of and prior to social relations). That links Butler, Arnold, Wordsworth, & Milton. There's another perspective. There was a brief period almost 60 years ago when I was superficially influenced by a jumble from T.E. Hulme, Irving Babbitt, & T. S. Eliot, when it became important to define "romanticism" and "classicism." Couldn't be done, but in all sorts of contexts it is still possible for those terms to be roughly usable and useful without achieving an acceptable definition of them beyond what is provided by a particular context. Probably the same is true of "postmodernism," and it is merely a hiccup in the conversation when someone comes along demanding a definition of it. Carrol > think i'll go listen to veruca salt's *seether*... mh
