postmodernism
Article
postmodernism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between January 29, 2021 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “isn’t that usually code for stuff like queer theory, postcolonial theory, and postmodernism?”; “Postmodernism is closer to the correct timeframe, but it started in Europe”; “the book … tussles with postmodernism”. It most often appears alongside America, Harvard, US.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: January 29, 2021
- Last seen: December 04, 2024
Appears In
- Contra Weyl On Technocracy
- Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
- Your Book Review: The Pale King
- Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
- Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
Related Pages
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- America (3 shared issues)
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- Harvard (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- Yale (3 shared issues)
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- brutalism (2 shared issues)
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- England (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- Jews (2 shared issues)
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- Le Corbusier (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- Seeing Like A State (2 shared issues)
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- socialism (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
And would Weyl's suggestions really help prevent populist backlashes? He wishes we abandoned our overly-rational ways in favor of "humanities, Continental philosophy, and the humanistic social sciences" - isn't that usually code for stuff like queer theory, postcolonial theory, and postmodernism? Are working-class Trump supporters really banging on their keyboards when they read about effective altruism, shouting "YOU NEED TO STOP TRYING TO BE OBJECTIVE AND FACT-BASED, AND BE MORE OPEN TO INSIGHTS FROM QUEER THEORY AND POSTMODERNISM"?
* Postmodernism is closer to the correct timeframe, but it started in Europe. Furthermore, the concept of a meritocracy determined by standardized testing is *much* closer to High Modernism than premodern elites, and some serious explanation would be needed for this meritocratic elite to be the ones that turned against meritocracy.
For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes,1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify.
Inline links: 1
1) How to transcend postmodernism
Postmodernism can be understood as the idea that we’re so trapped within language that reality remains remote. At its most extreme, postmodernism seems to suggest that language is all that exists. In politics, this manifests as movements that focus on how people speak, much more than movements of the past; and in literature, as writing that aims not to immerse the reader in a plausible world, but to keep the reader hyper-focused on the fact that they’re reading a work of fiction. Wallace began his literary career as a postmodernist,4 before swerving away mid-career, most dramatically with Infinite Jest.
Inline links: 4
Only two things block me from becoming a Cultural Theist. The first is boring: I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical". I don't ask anyone else to share that particular quirk. So I find the second more interesting: the Cultural Christianity argument hinges on the proposition that all liberal societies without Christianity will eventually collapse into wokeness and postmodernism. But Christianity also eventually collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism. So if they're both equally doomed, why not at least be truthful by advocating for the virtuous liberal society I wanted in the first place?
That is, suppose I were to advocate a return to 1890s norms of (let's say) liberalism and beautiful art. The Cultural Christian would tell me this is doomed, because the 1890s cultural package eventually fell apart and became the 20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism (and fascism, socialism, New Dealism, etc). Therefore, I should support Christianity.
I am no fan of medieval theocracy. But I do have a weakness for the 1880 - 1930 period of fin de siecle culture, Art Nouveau, economic liberty, and progressophilia. This period wasn't very religious - Nietzsche had already declared God dead in 1882. But the Cultural Christians would argue that such a flowering of culture and optimism could only happen within a generation or two of a Christian society. It (they would argue) contained the seeds of its own destruction, doomed to degenerate into our current postmodernist brutalist whatever. If I want the 1890s back, I shouldn't advocate the (mostly classically liberal) positions of the 1890s. I should advocate for Christianity, the only ideology under which something like those positions can be stable.
Wolfe ties this to the contemporaneous rise of pop art. Modern art and architecture were founded in the rejection of bourgeois notions of beauty, in favor of a faux-proletarian idea of simplicity and scientificness. But, Venturi pointed out, proletarians were kind hard to find in c. 1970 America. Grounding your class analysis in a non-existent proletariat seemed kind of out-of-touch, and so - perhaps - bourgeois. Who actually existed? The middle class. And what did the middle class like? Mass market consumer slop. Therefore, the true foundation of Art should be mass market consumer slop. Of course, since artists are superior to the middle class, it should be some sort of extremely complicated reference to mass market consumer slop which makes it clear that the artist themselves is infinitely above such things (but also, what if they weren’t above it, because they were so in-touch with normal people (but also, obviously they’re infinitely above it (but also, what if they weren’t))) . . . and so on. This tendency eventually became postmodernism with all its layers of irony and self-reference.
In architecture, postmodernism relaxed the constraint that every building had to be a box, in favor of buildings that were “playful” and tried to “undermine” traditional notions of form and shape:
Postmodern buildings were allowed to include some traditional elements and ornamentation, but only to refer to them ironically, confuse people about them, or mock them.