"What the Great Depression Did to Culture"

[SGT Rocket]

Awesome

Postmodernism in two words: "Anything Goes."

In a few more words: "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."

In a whole bunch more words: go here.

Great! I'll read the link directly. I think I'm NOT a post-modernist. lol

 

[SGT Rocket]

I think you can throw all of those under the "pop culture" umbrella, really -- it's basically defined as any kind of culture produced for mass consumption, as opposed to "high" culture, even if it's supposedly the product of a "marginalized" subgroup. "Popular Culture Studies" tries to examine how they meld into some ill-defined cultural mass that can basically be interpreted in whatever way a PhD candidate wants to interpret it. Or, if you want to be cynical, it's a discipline that lets college kids get class credit for reading comic books and watching "Star Trek," as long as they pretend not to enjoy it.

This explains the Star Trek classes in college (didn't take any).

I guess the "Pop" in the sub-cultures would be the common thread running through each of the sub-cultures. Like, "everyone" want's a car, the type of car you want reflects the expression of you as an individual in relation to your sub-culture.

Ok, bad example, but I think I get it.

I don't think I'm very "pop." But, as long as the wife approves, that's a good thing.

I love this board, one can learn so much here!

 

[Foofoogal]

A lot of this comes from a sense of urgency that these people had or have. This sense of urgency pushed them to consider the current state of affairs between the sexes, between the races, between the workers and the bosses, between the animals and the meat-eaters, between the gays and the straights, etc., as completely intolerable. Thus they get very hissy if anyone comes along who disagrees with them, or even has a different emphasis on some social issue. They feel that if you do not agree with the party line, you are one of "THEM." It's really fascinating on a sociological level.

Before I decided that after all I was an atheist, I used to call myself a Catholic. This immediately raised the suspicion of these people. A few had a faint amount of respect as that religion is so old and venerable, but most only look at its oppressive features.
__________________

So basically now the way I see it as once upon a time some were oppressed, now all are oppressed or stifled. Really a very unique time in history and not a good time IMHO.

 

[LizzieMaine]

(Should Have Been) The Death of Postmodernism

The Social Text Affair, in which a very, very, fed-up physicist proposed a postmodern understanding of quantum gravity as "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook," and had it published in one of the leading cultural-studies journals.

 

[Dr Doran]

The Social Text Affair, also known as the Alan Sokal Hoax, is one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. I'd love to teach a class on it. Sokal pretended to be a postmodern scientist and submitted to a postmodern journal called Social Text a barely-comprehensible article in which he argued that the effects of gravity are subjective. The supreme irony of this idiotic claim naturally did not register on the editors who published it. After Sokal revealed the truth, they NEVER backed down and kept idiotically insisting that "the only hoax he pulled was one on himself" (read aloud in very nasal voice for maximum effect). The funny thing is, at that time, postmodernism was closely allied with leftist causes (still true, but even more so when the hoax happened) and one of the justifications for postmodernism was highly Leftist: that postmodernism led to resistance against Power (in Foucault's term) and thus liberation of the Oppressed. The postmodernists painted anyone who opposed postmodernism as a reactionary conservative who only wanted Power to be maintained in the status quo. But Sokal was highly leftist -- that's the funny part. He was a politically committed leftist scientist, but he was also a real scientist, and the truth-claims of postmodernism (see the wonderful John Searle article I linked) horrified him such as "truth is entirely dependent upon the viewer." Sokal is a great genius of anti-postmodernism. I have another book he co-wrote called Fashionable Nonsense. It's great. Another good work on these lines is an anthology called The Flight From Science And Reason. It's uneven, but good.

 

[Brian Sheridan]

Working in academia after a career in journalism, you quickly learn that "the egos are so large because the stakes are so small."

 

[Dr Doran]

Tempests in teapots.

 

[Haversack]

For an entertaining burlesque of postmodernism in an academic setting, I would recommend Book, by Robert Grudin. It is something of a murder mystery set in the English department of the University of Washagon. Central to the plot is the academic putsch by the postmodernists in the faculty and the transformation of the English Department into the Department of Literary Theory. Grudin is emeritus in the English Department at the University of Oregon.

Haversack.

 

[Dr Doran]

That's hilarious -- I just met Grudin a year ago. He lives near me. He retired from the University of Oregon at Eugene (great campus!). I had no idea that he wrote a book like that. I'll have to dig up his business card! It says simply "Robert Grudin. Knowledge." and then a phone number.

 

[Haversack]

Robt. Grudin

I never met him but he was the adviser of a friend of mine when we were both in grad-school there in Eugene. (He was in English, I was in architecture). I learned of _Book_ from him. As my friend's area of scholarship was Anglo-Saxon literature, he had little truck with post-modernism.

Haversack.

 

[Jack Armstrong]

This has been a most interesting discussion. The things that annoy you folks also get under my own skin, but it's good to see them all discussed so eruditely. I work for a large university, so I see this up close and ugly all the time.

 

[Dr Doran]

This has been a most interesting discussion. The things that annoy you folks also get under my own skin, but it's good to see them all discussed so eruditely. I work for a large university, so I see this up close and ugly all the time.

Academics have big egos, don't they. It's such a competitive environment. They are all being judged by their students, their colleagues, their editors, their department heads, their tenure review boards, and their spouses and children. No wonder things can get ugly!

Luckily, I have the relatively benevolent vintage scene to lighten everything for me. The academics that don't have something like that are pretty tense; plus, they dress like cr_p.

 

[Mid-fogey]

Wow...

...I think I'll go in tommorow and hug one of my F-22s. I don't know how you all take it.