Head to Head: please explain postmodernism

This week’s topic: ‘That no-one who uses the term ‘post-modernism’ actually knows what it means ‘ and nor does that matter.’

Peter Whitehead
Hell is other people discussing post-modernism.

But here goes’

This week’s topic is what I wish I’d said at too many parties in the ’80s, turning on my heel and exiting on the stroke of midnight. Instead I sacrificed many dark hours spelling out simple facts to mindless pseuds whose negligible capabilities were blunted by [regrettably] less than lethal doses of drugs and alcohol.

To have said that would have made me another of the no-ones. An unfortunate conundrum which only my wife could love.

I might have been wrong to say that PoMo doesn’t matter, but it would have got me out of those awful burlesques of debate that tended to end with my primal screaming: ‘If there is no truth, what are you telling me”

Someone who claims to know something about this is Walter Truett Anderson, a futurist who turns 80 next year and President of the World Academy of Art and Science. The title of the best known of his thirteen books, Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World, sort of says it all.

Anderson reckons there are four world views:
‘ postmodern-ironist ‘ truth is socially constructed
‘ scientific-rational ‘ truth is found through rigorous inquiry
‘ social-traditional ‘ truth lies in the heritage of Western civilisation
‘ neo-romantic ‘ truth is attained through spiritual harmony with Nature.
You are welcome to his cans of worms.

I now glide elliptically closer to home where PoMo goes with the BoHo flow.

A mate of mine declares the War on Drugs over with the final whimper of the Bush misrulerdom. No longer is it an act of political protest to take the odd toke. Not for him the fate of those doughty Nipponese still bellicose on their Pacific atolls decades after WWII. Now the USA has an inhaling user in the White House my buddy no longer has to lay his life on the line inhaling toxic waste with his THC.

So don’t put that in your pipe and smoke it’.

Andrew Woodhouse
‘Post-modernism’ is a contradiction in terms and the new nihilism: meaningless. If ‘modern’ is up-to-date, how can anything be ‘post’ modern’ P-mism is defined by Wikipedia as ‘various movements in reaction to modernism’ or by absurdity.’
Absurd is right.
P-mism proves Newton’s second Law of Motion: That everything has an equal and opposite reaction.
First floated in the 1870s, P-mism referred to a period in art, later becoming a full-on philosophy, stating that truth is a social construct.
Let me say straight up: this is wrong. There are four types of truth, mathematical truth: 2+2 = 4; historical truth: Andrew had plum-pudding for Christmas lunch. These are objective. The other kinds, moral truths such as ‘honesty is best’; and religious truths: ‘there is a god,’ are subjective. I do believe in intrinsic truths, not constructs.
So P-m jokes are un-funny, using parody or irony instead, apparently. Booo-ring.
And since each philosophy has its own language, P-m-speak is in and plain expression is out. ‘We should listen to the views of people outside of our society to learn about cultural biases that affect us’, becomes ‘We need to hear intertextual, multi-vocalities of postcolonial others beyond our culture to learn the phallogocentric (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic) biases that mediate our identities’.
All clear’
So if truth is out, it’s OK to say the wrong thing ‘ just be clever about it.
Use long sentences, suffixes, prefixes, hyphens and slashes: post-, hyper-, pre-, de-, dis-, re-, ex-, -ism, -itis, -iality, -ation, -itivity, and -tricity. Be ambiguous. Add impressive schools of thought, eg Foucaultianism.
Take my post-modern test today. Convert ‘contemporary buildings are alienating’, into P-m-speak.
Voila! ‘Pre/post/spacialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commit us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of antisociality/seductivity enunciated in a de/gendered-Foucaultianism discourse of granulated subjectivity’.
Meaningless muddles.
If queried, add: ‘the instability of a question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity can’t express the logocentric coherency you seek. Reality is more uneven.’
This is funny, proving that P-mism is a joke and its theories tendentious twaddle.
Pass the Burgundy and biscotti please.