MetaFilter posts tagged with postmodernism

Italo Calvino's Letters

Rustic Etruscan — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:30:34 -0800

The New Yorker is publishing excerpts from Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985, translated by Martin McLaughlin, on its book blog. (via) Part One (linked above the fold): 10-11 May 1942, to Eugenio Scalfari Part Two: 8-11-46, to Silvio Micheli Part Three: 24 August 1959, to Luigi Santucci Part Four: 24-6-68, to Guido Fink Part Five: 7.23.73, to Pier Paolo Pasolini The Paris Review is also excerpting the book: March 7, 1942, to Eugenio Scalfari Calvino previously.

Is it the terrorists?

Potomac Avenue — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:06:29 -0800

Illegals -- Aliens as oppressed or oppressing groups in Avatar, Super 8, Attack the Block and... Alf? (Previously)

Or, the ethics of popular culture

subdee — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 07:54:11 -0800

Sub-Cultural Darwinism: Some Thoughts on the Rise and Fall of Fandoms

From cutting edge to the museum.

ClanvidHorse — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:47:56 -0800

The decline of post-modernism- a short(ish) essay.

Pomobama

Rumple — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:52:42 -0800

Categories as fundamental as fact and fiction, news and entertainment, gender and sexuality, have eroded away. In literature and architecture, in cuisine, in music, in fashion and furnishings, everywhere, everything—it’s fusion and mix. Barack Obama emerged as a literal embodiment of this age. To educated people, especially younger people with generally progressive views, other candidates suddenly looked parochial by comparison—or simply outdated. In his ethnicity and biography and in his personality and politics, Obama, the conciliator, was above all a combiner. Because he was from virtually everywhere—Kenya, Indonesia, Honolulu, Harvard, Chicago’s South Side—he was also from nowhere. The pastiche of his persona made him “his own man” in a new sense of the term.

On the Politics of Pastiche and Depthless Intensities: The Case of Barack Obama

Postmodernism is dead.

spiderskull — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:22:24 -0800

Postmodernism is dead.

High art, Low art, and OHHH YEAH!

codacorolla — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 08:21:44 -0800

Koolaid Man in Second Life: “Maybe the Internet is for me what Paris in the 20s was for Joyce, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein or New York in 50s was for Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg.” Jon Rafman (previously with the 9eyes Google Streetview blog) gives guided tours of Secondlife, and records some of his experiences. Being related to Secondlife, some content is naturally not work safe. The interview from which the quote in the FPP is pulled. My favorite quote from the video linked above,

You know there's an aspect of Seconlife that's grotesquely kitsch. And I can't help but, and I can't help but lov[e] this aspect. I think we've reached a point now... my generation... where we don't even know whether we're celebrating something, and saying it's great and affirming it, or if we're engaging in ironic critique and mocking it. We've almost collpased the two.

Art:21 Blog writes,

According to Rafman, it is the live navigation of Second Life that constitutes “the performance,” which goes down something more like an experiential, group lecture that favors extroverted participants. It is Rafman who navigates Kool-Aid Man; however, he asks attendees for their input on what to do, where to go, and what to say to other avatars while perusing the program. Like a physical tour with an informed tour guide, Rafman invites the audience to ask questions throughout the tour. During the performance, we stumbled upon virtual parties, orgies, dystopian wastelands, and the most bizarre social encounters occurring between other avatars

_{Found via Frontsection's art column.}

Hear genius.

auralcoral — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:15:33 -0800

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project, a still-growing collection of interviews, radio profiles, and readings (including staged ones of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men).

The Decline of the English Department

JL Sadstone — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:39:42 -0800

William Chace, former university president (Wesleyan and Emory) and Eng. Prof., on the decline of the English department, with lots of good ideas for why and how, as well as some thoughts on what to do about it. (Albeit no explicit blame to the true scourge: postmodernism and the relativity of it all…).

Culture & Barbarism

Dumsnill — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:25:40 -0800

Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism. (via)

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

zoomorphic — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:09:20 -0800

"We could all do worse than to write like Saul Bellow. And when I say write like Saul Bellow, I mean be Saul Bellow. And when I say be Saul Bellow, I mean unzip the skin from his body and wear it as a sort of Saul Bellow suit so that we can get cozy in it and truly inhabit it and understand the Old Macher." Writer Colson Whitehead parodies formidable literary critic James Wood and his 2008 treatise, How Fiction Works. At this point in his increasingly controversial scholarship, Mr. Wood is probably used to such cheek from those kids writing books on his lawn. James Wood has applauded the study of literature as an ageless aesthetic rather than a reflection on contemporary culture, fractured selfhood, and globalization--a view cherished by older critics like Harold Bloom and lately eschewed by the 43-year old Harvard professor's newfangled contemporaries. Wood's hidebound distaste for identity politics marks a schism between late modernism and post-modernism, a rift best viewed from above in this infamous review of Zadie Smith's Booker Prize-winning White Teeth. Lamenting the new face of literature that revels in confusion, distortion, paranoia, and so-called hysterical realism, Wood not only wagged his finger at Smith, but also took literary giants Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace to task for tampering with the novel's "delicate structure." Smith responded to Wood's eulogy for the novel with characteristically wry idiom: "The novel is not an immutable fact of human artistic life, after all, just a historically specific phenomenon that came and will go unless there are writers who have the heart, the brain and, crucially, the cojones to keep it alive." For now, Wood reigns comfortably as one of the most daunting critics of literature in English, even enjoying a few tentative fans from the under-40 crowd. But the success of writers like Colson Whitehead, a 31-year old, African-American, Pulitzer Prize-candidate who lists a Run DMC song as an "important plot point" in his upcoming novel Sag Harbor, marks yet one more step in literature's shift from the 20th century to the 21st.

Postmuddleism is not dead, yet....

Xurando — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:25:42 -0800

French Theory. "This is drivel about drivel — “metadrivel” as some stucturalist, post-structuralist or deconstructionist might say."

Like A Face Drawn in Sand at the Edge of the Sea

nasreddin — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:01:56 -0800

A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.

"Saint" Michel Foucault (1926-1984) transformed Western thought. Institutions -- prisons, asylums, clinics -- define the rhythm of our daily existence; Foucault found that they also determine the way we think. The search for the political and philosophical implications of this insight led him to biology and economics, linguistics and the study of sexuality. In Foucault's eyes, intellectual activity, however radical, could never be divorced from the techniques of power. This is why some have accused him of political quietism. Other critics say he was simply a bad scholar. Who was the real Foucault? "Anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal," gay saint, charlatan, or something else entirely? Perhaps we have posed the question incorrectly...

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

washburn — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:28:54 -0800

Richard Rorty, American Pragmatist philosopher, has died of pancreatic cancer.

Blogging, the nihilist impulse

the_bone — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:43:04 -0800

"Bloggers are nihilists because they are 'good for nothing'. They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force." "Blogging, the nihilist impulse," based on a lecture by Geert Lovink.

How I got critically bit in my socially constructed ass

elgilito — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 08:28:44 -0800

Made in Criticalland. Sociologist Bruno Latour reflects upon the way social construction and social critique have been instrumentalised by lobbyists, conspiracy theorists, "instant revisionists" and other unsavory people: We, in the academy, like to use more elevated causes–society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism–while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep Dark below. This from the guy who, thanks to his Relativistic account of Einstein's relativity, was one of the targets of the Sokal hoax.

"There has never really been any modernity, never any real progress, never any assured liberation."

Blazecock Pileon — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 23:46:18 -0800

Meditations on: the poetic and profane; on silence; death; catastrophe; Cage — and yet more strangeness and beauty from David Ralph Lichtensteiger's travels within the world of 20th C. avant garde music and postmodernism.

Jorg Sasse

sgt.serenity — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:36:20 -0800

The Work Of Jorg Sasse

Hypertextual antimony contra postmodernist discourse claims

painquale — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 13:40:57 -0800

Characterizing a Fogbank. A prominent analytic philosopher discusses whether postmodernism is worth taking seriously.

Greeks, postmodernism, and the rethinking of deomocracy

mountainmambo — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 19:20:00 -0800

Greeks, postmodernity, and the rethinking of democracy Found this fascinating interview on openDemocracy by way of meat-eating leftist. Greek opposition minister George Papandreou, son of former socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, says some interesting things about the changing nature of representative democracy and the new fluidity of citizens' political and social identities. Given our diminishing democracy in this country, it is refreshing to hear a politician say that individuals in society need to be empowered and that political leaders must listen to and trust individuals.

Why truth matters.

rushmc — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 10:32:43 -0800

Why truth matters.

Hornby on pop music

grumblebee — Wed, 26 May 2004 10:11:48 -0800

Nick Hornby discusses pop music in this NY Times essay: "Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool - a stranger to all notions of postmodernism - but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well."

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything

weston — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:34:11 -0800

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything. An engineer visits the world of postmodern literary criticism.

Art or Crap?

dydecker — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 19:55:52 -0800

Art or Crap? A quiz.

Postmodern Infotainment: I Rrivolously Link - You Decide

y2karl — Fri, 21 Feb 2003 16:48:01 -0800

How to Speak and Write Postmodern. Here is an etymology of the word postmodern--it begins with Walter Toynbee. Who'd athunk? All of this comes from Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought . The names lead not to essays but thorough links pages, like Ludwig Wittgenstein or Edmund Husserl. All the usual suspects are here--your Adorno, Baudrillard and the infamous Frankfurt School. *spooky ghost voice* Whoo-oo-oo! */spooky ghost voice* Well, there is Edward Said, but that one confuses me--I mean I read Edmund Husserl, and he, sir, is no Edmund Husserl. He actually makes sense. Which is more than I can say for Edmund Husserl. And it's all one huge page so you can scroll on down. Even I can do that. Hope I didn't brain my damage! To trump the smarty-pants who's going to link the Postmodernism Generator, I'm upping the ante--here's your Postmodern Mr. T.
Hey man, This time we're gonna do it my way!