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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 18, 2018 - 04:07pm PT
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Wrong interpretation.
Perfect!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 18, 2018 - 05:18pm PT
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Well put, Largo.
Paul, you slay me.
And, yes. There are many criticisms that can be made against postmodern sensibilities. It helps to read some writing on the subject. As an easy introduction, I'd suggest reading a little about postmodern architecture, where postmodern ideas might have first showed up popularly in the 1960s as dual-coding--where two different architectural styles are put together in a single playful, pluralistic, and ironic design. (See, Charles Jencks, "What is Post-Modernism?" 1985.)
If religion is the opiate of the masses, then modernism is the opiate of intellectuals.
Not all postmodern thought is deconstructive nihilism of a few noteworthy philosophers. It really depends upon who and what one reads. (For serious investigators, I'd suggest Francois Cusset's, "French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States." 2003.) It's like anything else these days: we live in a world of highly fragmented and inconsistent perspectives, values, and beliefs.
THAT is postmodernism in everyday life. Dual or multiple coding; irony; playfulness; ambiguity; doubt about, or rejection of, grand narratives and authority; self-reflection / self-reflexivity; interconnected complexity and complications; social construction; etc.
Postmodernism is a response to modernism. Mies van der Rohe (and a great many others) claimed that industrialization would solve the social, economic, technical, and artistic problems of the 20th Century. van der Rohe's black style of regimented industrialization was forged in 1933 for the Nazi Reichsbank, and was later adopted by corporate America in the 1960s when "1 percent for art" rule was meant to humanize and sweeten corporate style of buildings (square, tall glass and concrete monoliths similar to what we all saw in the movie, "2001") to people who had to live in them. In modernist eyes, industrial architectural style was seen as a style of absolute integrity, heroic honesty, accompanied by mathematical rigor. As some of you might know, entire cities or communities were built with these ideas in mind in Europe and in big American cities for low-income populations. The people who had to live in them literally destroyed those buildings (Cabrini Green in Chicago is a great example) because they were so de-humanizing.
Mind wants more than what logic or science can provide to it.
Postmodernism is but one response to modernism that's gone too far. The more one looks around, the more one sees of it and its remnants.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 18, 2018 - 05:49pm PT
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we live in a world of highly fragmented and inconsistent perspectives, values, and beliefs.
THAT is postmodernism in everyday life.
It would be wrong to call that wrong. Making light of such handwringing is not to call it wrong.
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WBraun
climber
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May 18, 2018 - 07:01pm PT
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Postmodernism is just another st00pid ism masqueraded as advanced and evolved ......
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 18, 2018 - 07:02pm PT
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It would be wrong to call that wrong. Making light of such handwringing is not to call it wrong.
Nice, could have been written by Derrida or Foucault somewhere out in the heat of Death Valley.
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WBraun
climber
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May 18, 2018 - 07:04pm PT
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LOL ......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 18, 2018 - 07:28pm PT
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could have been written by Derrida or Foucault somewhere out in the heat of Death Valley.
Or by some guy from Austin, Texas.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 19, 2018 - 07:58am PT
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Duck: Postmodernism is just another st00pid ism masqueraded as advanced and evolved ......
I didn’t create the word nor the generalization. I tried my best to show above how many different views there are of “postmodern thought.”
Generalizations always seem to be inaccurate and misleading. (I shouldn’t have to explain variegation to you.) This, too, is what some so-called “postmodernists” have written: be more circumspect with all-encompassing generalizations.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 19, 2018 - 09:26am PT
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There is an exception to every rule.
Including that one?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 19, 2018 - 10:10am PT
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Nice, could have been written by Derrida or Foucault somewhere out in the heat of Death Valley.
-
If you've read those guys you're laughing. Some of their drift sounds indistinguishable from straight-up double talk, heat-stroke babble or verbal wanking. But the point, slippery at times, is well taken.
For me, a writer, postmodernism implied (and in some cases said so outright) that the classical narrative template, with its tidy beginning, middle and end, was a construct that didn't square, whatsoever, with the fits and starts and fragmented story line found in most people's lives. We're all half completed, unresolved, moving sideways, backwards, down and up. Ordering this into a coherent sequence is at best, misleading, at worse, unreal. The best we can do is describe it. Or try to, lest we imply a symmetry and sequence that simply ain't there.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 19, 2018 - 10:47am PT
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If you've read those guys you're laughing.
And also if you haven't, I hope.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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May 19, 2018 - 04:18pm PT
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I watch scripted series on TV and I frequently see what John is talking about. Some years ago an episode would be more or less linear with a beginning, a middle, and an end, following the arrow of time with lapses and accelerations here and there. Nowadays, there are so many disconnected flashbacks and wanderings from character to character it's hard to assimilate the story line. The FX drama Trust is a case in point. It wanders about in various time streams amidst various story lines - to me it is postmodern.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 19, 2018 - 06:29pm PT
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John, you can trace this trend back to Crash, or earlier. Yet in each block, you still see pretty standard linear story telling. It's just the transitions and timeline of the overall story that is wonky and weirdly sequenced, as though someone cut and pasted a linear story into another order. Arty, in a sense, but it's hard not to make this feel like a device or gimmick, IMO.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 19, 2018 - 08:18pm PT
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as though someone cut and pasted a linear story into another order
There could be an interesting insight into the "What is Mind?" question.
Why does our memory often order events in a 'linear' sequence?
Take a story or poem that you know well. Could you speak the words in a different sequence as quickly as you can when telling the story in the usual order?
A computer could be made to rearrange the words or sentences of a story with no difficulty.
Our memory does not work like the storage in a typical computer. How are they different?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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May 19, 2018 - 08:28pm PT
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And one step beyond that is FX's Legion, which I find virtually incomprehensible (although Dan Simmons is excellent, as always).
The arrow of time gets warped pretty badly if not downright broken in this one.
edit: How many recall Out of the Past from 1947? I remember a flashback within a flashback.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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May 19, 2018 - 09:22pm PT
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There was a rather famous literary critic who taught at the U of Toronto. His name was Northrup Frye. He’s surely out of vogue now, but in his time (50s-60s), his ideas about archetype stories resonated with many people, and was later further developed (maybe best by Robert McKee).
Frye said that almost all successful stories followed one of four patterns: romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you once you’ve learned the elements of the patterns. Of course, it’s all intellectual, but it touches on “natural storylines” that seem to satisfy us. Storylines that don’t have, for example character development, are difficult to resonate with many of us. We don’t walk out of a movie or from a book and say either that (i) “life is just like that” or (ii) “life should or shouldn’t be like that.”
I see or read so few good stories these days. I guess I’d sound like any old person. Most of the time, I don’t get the new narratives and styles of presentations. I have to ask my wife who’s a lot younger. Hanging around me, however, I think I’ve corrupted her ideals. But she grew up in Hollywood and has a great deal to say about acting (whew).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 20, 2018 - 09:23am PT
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There is an author who takes the reader to the end of physics, and beyond the end of time.
From the LA review of books:
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AT ONE POINT in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the guilt-ridden alcoholic millionaire narrator, Eliot Rosewater, crashes a science fiction convention. He drunkenly praises the assembled writers as “the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on” and “the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit.” Eliot admits that the SF writers “couldn’t write for sour apples” but still holds them in high esteem in comparison to the modernist boobs his foundation generously funds: “the hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born.”
Cixin Liu is exactly the sort of writer Vonnegut had in mind, 50 years after the fact.
Where are we at the end of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past books, the works that put Chinese science fiction on the global map? We’re in a space of infinite possibility
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 20, 2018 - 09:25am PT
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Regarding all that fancy French philosophy, in so far as it wakes us up to prejudices in thought and provides insights into otherwise calcified acceptance, I'm all for it. But when it declares all hierarchies as functions or structures solely of power, when everything is interpreted as a cog in a structure of oppression, I find it hard to take seriously.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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May 20, 2018 - 11:37am PT
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In my opinion, one of the major problems with this thread is the conflation of the origin of mind with the products of mind. I believe that philosophy is only relevant for the products of mind. This includes ethics, aesthetics, history, and epistemology. The origin of mind (metaphysics on the philosophy side) seems clearly (to me) to be a scientific question. The answer, using the broadest brush, is evolution. I've always focused on the former on this thread. The idea that you can use only philosophical arguments and ignore empirical(scientific) evidence to answer the question of the origin of mind seems absurd.
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