But this thread is an excellent illustration for what I have been saying about people talking past each other on the subject of postmodernism because of definitions and misunderstandings of the term & what is being criticised. I feel the need for a thread of my own. https://twitter.com/AaronRHanlon/status/935155939816235009 …
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These are two of the most influential forms of critical theory currently dominant in society? Does it seem to have eschewed postmodernism? No. It just found a way around the pure deconstruction element which did not allow a stable reality to exist at all.
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I think it was Mary Poovey who said something like 'To do feminism, we need to be able to say that certain people in a certain place & time experience certain disadvantages.' The most extreme forms of postmodernism did not allow for such a truth claim to be made.
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Poovey argued that deconstructive techniques could therefore be used as a toolbox to pull things accepted as true apart but there still needs to be some pragmatism to address things happening in the world. But what was happening in the world just got a lot more interpretative.
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A similar thing happened within queer theory and postcolonial theory - categories and histories accepted as true remained broken down & argued to have been constructed in the first place by discourses of power (epitome of PoMo) but made more addressable. Truth claims were back.
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Therefore one could claim that patriarchy & white supremacy really existed - truth claim - but also that truth was subjective and rights to claim it lay with those with lived experience of it.
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Do the theorists using these methods use the word 'postmodernism'? Not usually. Do they cite Derrida? Seldom. Lyotard? Not much. Foucault? Rather more. Are the core ideas of language constructing reality, epistemic & moral relativity PoMo in origin. Absolutely.
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This is what critics of postmodernism are criticising. Radical cultural constructivism, the loss of individuality & universality to group identity, an intense focus on power of language, a distrust of reason & objective knowledge. These exist & their intellectual roots are PoMo
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Academics who say postmodernism is dead are usually thinking too academically! They're either like theologians pointing to the original texts to defend them against how the religion has evolved and is being practiced and affecting real people (if they want to defend PoMo)
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...or they are a little embarrassed about the excesses of postmodernism & want to distance themselves from it and claim they're doing something else now but they have actually internalised the key ideas abt discourses, cultural constructivism, knowledge and reason.
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I have got away from the original topic which was 'does this affect literary criticism today' and onto 'does this affect society today' because the latter is rather more important. It affects both tho.
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Try bringing an empirical or scientific approach to bear on literary criticism in the realms of identity, power balance, individuality, knowledge and see how well it goes down. It doesn't. This book by
@jonathangottsch is excellent on that. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gottschall-Jonathan-Literature-Humanities-Paperback/dp/B01DHEV1ZS/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1511852677&sr=8-8&keywords=jonathan+Gottschall …Show this thread -
Academics who take issue with critics of postmodernism & say we are criticising a boogeyman need to look at what we are actually criticising and be honest about whether postmodernism & its evolution through critical theory & into activism had anything to do with it.
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Areo will soon be publishing an extended version of my statement on this for the Battle of Ideas panel - The Academic Origins of Post-Truth Society. It explains better.
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But this is not wrong: https://twitter.com/AaronRHanlon/status/935164685820878848 … People are more aware of postmodernism now in the Trump/Brexit era because its broken the bounds of academia and caused significant damage to the left thereby influencing the surge to the right.
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It's not just annoying ppl in the humanities who'd like to be more rigorous & evidence-based. It evolved & entered leftist social conscience trading on the good name of the civil rights movement, feminism & Gay Pride & catastrophically undermined it.
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So yes, rightists will name it & attack it as all that is wrong with the left but they often misidentify it as an expansion of Marxism (rather than just as a replacement for Marxism) to conflate the two enemies - the identitarian left & economic left.
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Sometimes this is an ideologically-motivated conflation & to some extent it's excusable because anti-capitalism noises are still being made by the PoMo left but they're not very convincing & the surge of working class voters to the right demonstrates this. Their party forgot them
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But leftists like me attack postmodernism too because we'd actually like to fix the problem and be electable by reasonable people again, please.
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Bloody hell. I only got up to go to the loo but made the mistake of checking Twitter and found
@GodDoesnt had DMd me this thread with 'This might interest you.' Two hours and 50 tweets later... Damn you, Lindsay....Show this thread
End of conversation
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formatting???? I don't know what happen to the syntax
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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