[lbo-talk] Marc Cooper's flipping out over Churchill

Jon Johanning zenner41 at mac.com
Mon Feb 7 09:34:17 PST 2005


On Feb 7, 2005, at 1:14 AM, T Fast wrote:


> Hey Jon specifically which Pomo said this. Direct quote please,
> otherwise I will begin to think that you are not beginning to think
> that facts don't matter but rather that it is a matter of practice for
> you.

I'll give you a few quotes, which are admittedly not from the masters of the postmodernist school, but they're representative of what I have on hand and what I have consulted to form my (perhaps wholly misinformed) view of postmodernism, and I think they illustrate what I had in mind. I'm not sufficiently adept in the postmodernist mental twists and turns to tell whether these folks would agree that the statements about Eichmann Doug adduced are statements of fact, but let's hope that they would.

"Another aspect of Enlightenment thought ... is the idea that language is transparent, that words serve only as representations of thoughts or things, and don't have any function beyond that. Modern societies depend on the idea that signifiers always point to signifieds, and that reality resides in signifieds. In postmodernism, however, there are only signifiers. The idea of any stable or permanent reality disappears, and with it the idea of signifieds that signifiers point to. Rather, for postmodern societies, there are only surfaces, without depth; only signifiers, with no signifieds." -- Mary Klages (http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html)

"Postmodernism, on the other hand, argues that what we call knowledge is a special kind of story, a text or discourse that puts together words and images in ways that seem pleasing or useful to a particular culture, or even just to some relatively powerful members of that culture. It denies that we can have objective knowledge, because what we call knowledge has to be made with the linguistic and other meaning-making resources of a particular culture, and different cultures can see the world in very different ways, all of which 'work' in their own terms. It argues that the belief that one particular culture's view of the world is also universally 'true' was a politically convenient assumption for Europe's imperial ambitions of the past, but has no firm intellectual basis." -- "Semiotics and the Deconstruction of Conceptual Learning" by J. L. Lemke (Originally published in J. Soc. for Accelerative Learning and Teaching, 1994) (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/papers/jsalt.htm)

From the Wikipedia page on postmodernism:

"Postmodernism therefore has an obvious distrust toward claims about truth, ethics, or beauty being rooted in anything other than individual perception and group construction. Utopian ideals of universally applicable truths or aesthetics give way to provisional, decentered, local petit recits which, rather than referencing an underlying universal truth or aesthetic, point only to other ideas and cultural artifacts, themselves subject to interpretation and re-interpretation. The 'truth', since it can only be understood by all of its connections is perpetually 'deferred', never reaching a point of fixed knowledge which can be called 'the truth.' This emphasis on construction and consensus is often used to attack science, as the Sokal Affair shows."

Apparently I'm not the only one to use scare quotes, Eubulides.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax



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