My view is that there's no real boundary between late modernists (taking Descartes as the start of modernism) and early postmodernists/protopomos. — Kenosha Kid

I agree with the thrust of this, but I'd also argue that a marker of difference between modernism and postmodernism is an explicit self-awareness of the modernist sensibility and a self-reflexivity that is not overtly present in modernism. I mean, quick literary examples. Modernist authors: Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Marinetti. Real fuckin' weird, huge emphasis on experimentation with form, a response to dramatic changes in the world around them. Anyone not paying attention might mistake their work for 'postmodern'. And then postmodern: Pynchon, McCarthy, Palahniuk, Ashbury. Here you get a real involution of form, writers well aware of what they are doing and thematizing that awareness at the level of the work itself; they are writers incredibly comfortable with what they are doing in the sense of exhibiting a sense of "play" with their audience and themselves (no matter how 'dark' the subject matter gets). They take for granted the lack of foundationalism that seems to torture or perplex Joyce/Kafka/Beckett/Marinetti and turn it into an aesthetic principle to be explored for its own sake. It's the difference between "the world is fucked up, how should we respond?" and "the world is fucked up, so we may as well inhabit it".*

A proper reading would flesh this out with concrete examples but I'm lazy so. In a formula: the postmodern is the modern become self-conscious. Edit: one more example to really hammer it home: if Marx was a modernist (and he was), can we really say that his thought is also imperceptibly shades into postmodernism? He'd roll over in his grave.

I'm more and more convinced that the only people who actually speak about postmodernism are people who are 'against' it - whatever 'it' is. Irony of ironies, it's like the ultimate simulacrum.

I actually want to read these because people ask me about them all the time and I have nothing to say lol.

This is really cool. I like the way the SEP article is written too. It's got a bit of sass to it.

Duh.

:snicker:

the fact that so much additional 'infrastructure' is needed to excavate the few scattered diamond-splinters from mountains of frenchified turds indicates that one's time will be better spent shoveling up the muck prospecting for precious gems in the other "movements" "schools" "traditions" of philosophy & critical theory. — 180 Proof

Sounds like a you problem.

Might I suggest a time management app? We have those too now.

Man those who whine about 'postmodern obscurantism' at this point are just telling on themselves. Like, there is so much amazing literature and helpful guides and resources to this stuff that if you still can't figure it out in 2021, the common denominator is you. Not even a debate, just a straight confession.

What's that? Got nothing apart from your cut n' paste 30s Google search propaganda? Yeah, thought so. Run along.

If you ever come across a book called ”The History of Money" by Jack Weatherford, I'd be interested in your assessment. — frank

Gosh I have a whole reading list on money backlogged under my bed. Maybe, maybe.

We have to remember that WWII really can't be separated from the Holocaust, so the factors that led to the Holocaust are also complicit in WWII: German religious/cultural traditions, the merger of science and race, historic anti-Semitism, and a host of other factors. — K Turner

Indeed, in this connection it's worth mentioning that the Nazi's explicitly looked to America as a model of how to implement state racism:

When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States. “America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.” In particular, Nazis admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against Black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.

...Yet they ultimately decided that it wouldn’t go far enough. ... Because of this, Nazis were more interested in how the U.S. had designated Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as “nationals.” ... But a component of the Jim Crow era that Nazis did think they could translate into Germany were anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriages in 30 of 48 states. ... The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents. Which means, as Whitman notes, “that American racial classification law was much harsher than anything the Nazis themselves were willing to introduce in Germany.”

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow

The key here is to distinguish between one being complicit and one being actually, directly responsible for something. If your boss fires you and you go home and kick your dog your boss may be complicit, but he's not responsible for your dog's injury. — K Turner

I don't think this is a particularly apt metaphor. American indifference and financial callousness was the subject of a more than a decade of policy wrangling and vexed appeals from blocs of nations which fell on deaf ears. Certainly, the Nazis were ultimately responsible for the suffering they caused, but their rise to power was enabled at multiple, decade-spanning points by American blitheness. And again, the point is, anyone with the audacity to say something as stupid as 'but for the US....' ought to know exactly what this 'but for...' entails.

On topic, this legacy of state racism is nowhere more apparently today than the racial terrorism of the Israeli state, propped by by this self-same maleficent American government.

He wrote an article for the WSJ about it. — frank

Yeah, I remember reading that when I came out. I'm pretty sure I even linked it here at some point. They're a great idea, but even then they would be attacks on the symptom, not the cause - which is capitalism.

Social Text was non-peer-reviewed — Kenosha Kid

Literally the only thing worth mentioning about the whole "affair", before moving on to discuss literally anything else. Or to quote Adam Kotsko:

"It was a total set-up — he proved what he wanted to prove because he totally set up the conditions so that only one answer was possible. A charitable reading of the situation from the journal’s perspective is that they ran the article because they were hungry for dialogue with scientists and were thrilled that Sokal was engaging in it. He lied to them, abused their trust, and then publicly mocked them — and somehow he’s a hero. It’s utter idiocy. And the fact of having been misused in a purposefully nonsensical article has no possible bearing on the value of the “postmodern theory” he pastiched."

Hold on. Why didn't these imperialist powers, which themselves had gladly enjoined The Great War that Kaiser's Reich had precipitated, not tell the US to fuck off for this extortion-among-friends (i.e. "gangsterism") by either (1) negotiating much more manageable terms or (2) defaulting outright to let the devil take the hindmost, as they'd say? — 180 Proof

In point of fact they did default - or rather, they simply stopped paying, and the whole issue was held in abeyance, at least until after WWII. But only after having moved proverbial mountains to service the debt, and having implored an indifferent and callous America to do something, anything, to ease the burden. Yet the US did the very opposite: it ratcheted up tariffs which effectively closed the US market - the only market not utterly devastated by war - to European producers ("free trade" my ass), while at the same time allowing both interest rates to rise - entailing massive capital flight from Europe to the US - and the dollar to go into free fall, making purchases out of Europe economically unviable.

And this is to say nothing about the fact that the (1) US loan terms were far more relaxed with Germany than they were with its own supposed 'Allies' in France and England, and (2) the US even entered WWI itself to guarantee continental orders on US manufacturing, and that (3) the Dawes and Young plans that @tim wood copy pasted were effectively restructuring efforts to allow private US capital to get in on the action from which they were not yet a part of. But these are minor details (some of which can be found in Radhika Desai's Geopolitical Economy, along with Hudson's book). In any case, post-default, without an external reason to work together, the European continent fractured as each went into it alone, with every other country raising protectionist barriers on every other, while arming themselves to the teeth as autarky become the order of the day.

Europe is certainly the opposite of blameless - they were both vindictive and stupid in their dealings with Germany and the US respectively - but the point of this digression was to respond to Tim's self-serving, historically fanciful idea that the US somehow stepped into the war out of the goodness of its blessed heart without which I would apparently not be speaking English. Regardless of whether or not Hudson overstates US complicity, it is undoubtable that US actions were a heavy spur to the most destructive war that ever took place on the face of the planet - so far. In any case it's worth remembering the moral of the story which is that the US is a despicable state responsible for global misery on a scale never been seen before with a legacy stretching back for more than a century. And as Niel Davidson put it, the only reason the US were not busy imperializing the globe earlier was because they were too busy genociding its native population as it imperialized its own "local" space.

Was the US just supposed to hemorrhage cash onto the Allies for the fun of it? — frank

You mean: was the US just supposed to give up it's cash cow which had yielded over 3 times in repayments on interest than the principal of its loan? And yeah sure, Britain could have just defaulted, it's not like defaulting would have put Britain in a bigger economic hole than it already was despite acting as a pure agent of financial transfer to the US, right?

Moral of the story: the US held Europe financially hostage because it is a shithole country, and WWII was the result of its gangsterism.

Ah yes, the 'ol "I am completely and utterly ignorant about this topic so here's a cut n' paste from a propaganda website which I found after half a minute of frantically Googling in order to defend my shitty country which was complicit in prompting the worst and most devesting war in the history of the planet". But since you're in the thick of it now, here's what the oh-so-benevolent Dawes plan yielded in practice:

"Germany was burdened with a sum calculated to reimburse the Allies for most of the damage wrought during the war, a sum that exceeded the total value of Germany’s corporate assets. It simply lacked the resources to provide the Allies with the funds necessary to amortize their debts to the United States and to each other. As Snowden (Phillip, Chancellor of the Exchequer -SX ) noted: 'When the funding arrangements which America had made with her European debtors fully mature she will be receiving approximately £120,000,000 [$600 million] a year on account of these debts. The most sanguine expectation of the yield of German reparations is not more than £50,000,000 [$250 million] a year, though the Dawes scheme provides for an eventual payment of £125,000,000 [$625 million] a year. But no authority believes that Germany will ever be able to pay a sum approaching the latter figure. Therefore, what all this amounts to is that America is going to take the whole of the German reparations and probably an equal sum in addition. This is not a bad arrangement for a country that entered the war with “No indemnities, and no material gain” emblazoned upon its banners'.

... Despite these facts, the U.S. Treasury persistently refused to consider its scheduled repayments and interest as being in any way contingent upon the receipt of German reparations by the Allied Powers. Britain therefore had to turn to France and Germany to raise the funds with which to pay its war debts to the United States. France had only Germany to turn to, and marched into the Saar in 1921 to take in kind what it could not obtain in cash. It was a period in which the most extortionate of nationalistic acts were inspired by frustration at the economic situation imposed upon the world by the United States."

As for the Young plan, which arrived DOA just in time for the onset of the great depression, it was effectively more diplomatic window dressing at extorting Europe for money it could not conceivably pay. And your own source notes American intransience at tying the cancellation of war debts to financial relief form the US: "After the November 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, France and the United Kingdom resurrected the link between reparations and war debts, tying their Lausanne Conference pledge to cancel their claims against Germany to the cancellation of their debts to the United States. The United States would not accept the proposal. By mid-1933, all European debtor nations except Finland had defaulted on their loans from the United States". And lend lease for WWII was a fucking joke too, but no doubt you'd have to scrabble to do some last minute Googling in order to know what in the world that was or how to even talk about it. Maybe you can find another propaganda website to copy and paste from.

I put most effort in trying to understand Deleuze. The book by Claire Colebrook was inscrutable, all it did wad repeat the word "difference" many times over. Other books, like his alphabet, just repeated the words with no insight. Eventually I just read many parts of A Thousand Plateaus, I got some fancy vocab and a vague idea, but not the rewards one would expect given the effort put in. — Manuel

Introductions to Deleuze are a mixed bag, although they've tended to get better over time, as the community has had more time to digest what is going on. My favorite is Levi Bryant's Difference and Givenness, but if you want something free, and also a pleasure to read, check out Jon Roffe's The Works of Gilles Deleuze, Vol. 1. Otherwise Daniel Smith's Essays on Dleueze is also unsurpassed. Colebrook... is not good as an intro.

Churchill's account was that the politicians understood very well the terms could not be met, but also that the public after the four years' strife would tolerate nothing less. — tim wood

Correct. Which is why the Europeans did almost everything they could to be leniant when it came to enforcement of repayment, knowing very well the utter abyss that lay before them were the terms held to a tee. Which might have worked, had the pig-headedness of the US not demanded payments on an utterly inflexible schedule from its Europeans 'allies' even as it made humongous profits off the interests of its war loans. As with everything the US touches, it all went to shit on its account.

It's pretty eye opening. It also details how US 'aid', along with the post-war trade institutions that it set up - the IMF and WTO - have more or less been a continued fucking of the developing nations, to the financial benefit of the US.

but for the US — tim wood

But for the US, whose ruthless pursuit of debt-claims in Europe after WWI virtually guaranteed continental depression and political fragmentation across the continent, WWII would likely not have ever happened. To quote the historian Michael Hudson,

"no Act contributed more to the genesis of World War II than the intolerable burdens that the United States imposed on its allies of World War I and, through them, on Germany. Every U.S. administration from 1917 through the Roosevelt era employed the strategy of compelling repayment of these war debts, above all by Britain. The effect was to splinter Europe so that the continent was laid open politically as a possible province of the United States. Private finance capital could not have achieved that end, especially as the United States disarmed after World War I. The division and immiserization of Europe could achieve it, had the world not tumbled into a depression. ... World War II erupted not because of strains created by private finance capital, but because of a world bankruptcy in which intergovernmental [specifically, US - SX] financial claims played the major role. The debt and reparations tangle rendered nationalism the path of least resistance, and made pan-European internationalism impossible".

So, how I really feel? Well since you asked - fuck everything about the US and anything it comes close to even remotely breathing beside.

Whose the pessimist now hmmm?

And yes all power should be unrelentingly critiqued, for all time, until eternity.

or is there a way? — BitconnectCarlos

Sure. The US can stop funding terrorist states like Israel, evacuate its imperial presence across the globe, redraw its ridiculous trade treaties which entrench global third world poverty, stop being the Earth's most violent enforcer state of capitalism and so on. Lots of things it can do. The universe is ripe with possibility :sparkle: And considering the US has had a continuity of fucking around and more importantly, fucking up the Middle-East since the idk, 40s without ever stopping, it's basically a straight line of American complicity to American complicity. Even bin Laden and 9/11 were outgrowths of US interventionism, which of course, they used as excuses to intervene more. Now that Afghanistan is going to go to shit (more so), one can only wait in anticipation till some new American dickhead decides it's time for a new invasion down the line in order to perpetuate the cycle.

ISIS vs the US? — BitconnectCarlos

Well the US created ISIS so they're on the same side and objectively the US has enabled and carried out far more terror than ISIS could carry out in a lifetime of existence (and continues to). Its material support for Israel being among those enabling factors.

The US might have more human rights abuses than a smaller terrorist group -- is the US the bad guy in this case? — BitconnectCarlos

Yes.

There seems to be some struggle to identify the novelty of postmodernity here, but I would suggest it is to be found in an area which seems to be relatively neglected so far in this thread - aesthetics. Pace Jameson, you have a few standout features: the prevalence of pastiche as an aesthetic form, the preponderance of irony, the increasing indiscernibility of 'high' and 'low' culture, the weakening of 'historicity' (the inability to locate ourselves in an arc of time, you simply get dislocated and fragmented temporal repetition), the 'waning of affect' (a 'flatness' of emotional tonality, where nothing surprises anymore, and everything is approached with ironic detachment), the suspicion of 'depth' and the valorisation of 'surfaces' in our aesthetic topographies, etc, etc

Taken in this way and as a set of feature relating to the sensibilities with which we apprehend the world, I'd say it's hard to deny that postmodernity - at least taken as a tendency or set of tendencies - has definitely had its time. The issue of the 'waning of affect' is one of the more questionable theses, and it's arguable that there's been a heightening of affective importance in recent times, but otherwise the rest of the list is pretty on point I'd say. On the other hand, there is the consideration of just how euro or Anglo-centric the notion is. Like, how much of this characterizes the sensibility present in Asia, Africa, or South America for instance? Is postmodernity a phenomenon more specific to the global north? I suspect so.

That all said, of all the features involved, my own winner for the most significant one is the waning of historicity. This goes hand in hand with the basic neoliberal premise that 'there is no alternative' (TINA) and the notion of "capitalist realism" - that there is no real future. That's been disrupted somewhat by the slow rot of the American empire and the rise of a new bi or tri polarity on the global scale (China-US-Russia), but even then you get this feeling that at stake is the rise of a new hegemon which only a few tweaks here and there (slightly less liberal, still capitalist as all hell). That we seem to be unable to locate ourselves in time (and space too!), is a big one. Jameson calls it an inability to engage in 'cognitive mapping'. More and more I find Benjamin's reflection on history to be more pertinent than ever:

"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (Thesis IX, Theses on the Philosophy of History).

God bloody dammit Jordies make a point that I totally missed and now I'm even more mad - we literally have a whole architecture in place to do vaccines for the flu shot every year which has been running for ages now, and instead of using that tried and true mechanism of public health this fucking government privatized the rollout. Not just in the sense of waiting for AZ or UQ to manufacture vaccines here - which they also did - but the actual logistics of rollout itself. FFFAAARRRrkrrrkkkkkkkkksdfsd this fuckinggg governmsdfgndasigdttshit.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/19/former-nsw-labor-ministers-eddie-obeid-and-ian-macdonald-found-guilty-of-corruption-charges

Some good news!:

The former NSW Labor ministers Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, and Obeid’s son Moses Obeid, have been found guilty of conspiracy to wilfully commit misconduct in public office over the allocation of coal licences in New South Wales in 2008. Obeid, 77, and his son Moses, 51, were accused of conspiring with Macdonald, 72, then the minister responsible for mineral resources, to grant a lucrative coal exploration licence over Obeid’s family farm, Cherrydale Park, in the Bylong Valley. Justice Elizabeth Fullerton, who presided over the case without a jury, heard from 38 witnesses in the year-long trial.

Fullerton found that a conspiracy to ensure a mining licence was granted over Obeid’s property was proved beyond reasonable doubt. She found there was evidence that Moses Obeid had formed an agreement some time before May 2008 with Macdonald, and that Macdonald had then proceeded as minister for mineral resources to take steps to ensure that a mining exploration licence was granted covering Cherrydale Park. In what is likely to become the leading case on criminal conspiracy in NSW, Fullerton found that the conspiracy was proved because Macdonald had agreed “to do what he could in connection with the granting of a licence at Mt Penny and to further the economic interests of the Obeids”.

Australians are cooowaaarddssss.

I didn't pull it out of thin air is my point. — Cheshire

No, of course you didn't, you're simply parroting the blueQ line which, with nothing to say about the billions of dollars poured in from American corporate financing, can't shut the fuck up about 'Russia'. The Koch's, the Wilk's, the Uihlein's, the Mercer's, the Adelson's, Foster Friess, Bernard Marcus, Regnery II (who, in some good news, died yesterday, one can only hope in miserable circumstances), Fox, local Super PACs with enormous funding and organizational capacity, Murdoch (an Australian blight we exported to the rest of the world), the preponderance of multimillionares in office who openly engage in insider trading... nooo it's a bunch of boogyman ex-KGB agents with Facebook accounts. Why would America, the home of the most brutal capitalist empire in the world, with a wildly active billionare activist class, take a swing to right, and into fascism? Must be Russians! This is blueQanon for Rachel Maddow watching morons.

And just to be clear, I have no doubt that 'Russia' has attempted to stir shit up in the US. It is what any sensible geostrategic rival would do to a nation as fucking stupid as the US. But they are, at best, a peripheral actor that piggbacked and plugged into an existing supermassive architecture of fascist bullshit peddled by homegrown extremists who have been cultivating a scared, ignorant, and fragile population for decades.

It's the answer to the variance in the groups — Cheshire

The 'answer to the variance in the groups' is that an enormous majority of Americans are extremist lunatics who, incapable of admitting it to themselves, need to blame a third party.

Yet for some reason these people are painted as radical Castro-loving communists by the right. — Mr Bee

Because Americans are the most politically shallow people on Earth.

There’s been progress even under our oligarchic system. — Xtrix

In which direction exactly? Wealth inequality is higher than ever, you run the world's largest gulag system, corporate capture of government power has probably never been more prevalent, US life expectancy is falling, your infrastructure is crumbling, your housing market is back up to 2008 levels with no countervailing forces in sight, your public services have been gutted, working rights have never been more scuttled as more and more workers turn to the gig economy as they wallow in precarity, your press has never been more subject to corporate imperatives ... that progress?

But I’m guessing you know all this already and are just being provocative. — Xtrix

No. Significant change does not occur so long as the ruling classes do not feel threatened. If their conditions of life and social reproduction are not rendered intolerable, anything else is just so much fluff.

Ugh, go collect your CIA pay, but don't bother me with this shit.

Yeah yeah, the organizers have been so tremendously successful so far. In any case you're right, hence my edit before your post :)

The funny thing is that Americans have historically known very well how to achieve change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long,_hot_summer_of_1967

They have just forgotten.

Assange is just another dodgy Aussie like murdoch — The Opposite

You're comparing a whistleblower journalist held in appalling conditions with one of the most powerful media moguls on Earth? Get a grip.

They were also almost entirely ineffective, with police brutality continuing unabated in the US today. Not enough police stations were set on fire.

I can't watch that now but of course he's being used by Putin for propaganda purposes. That's what anyone would do. Assange exposed US war crimes through entirely legal means and is being punished for it. Which is in keeping with the US being the most tyrannical regime on Earth. That's all you need to know.

Why would you think that?

The greatest present travesty against freedom of speech is the imprisonment of Assange. — Banno

I agree, but this thread isn't about that. If anything, the cruelty imposed on Assange is all the more reason why what the OP is about ought to be opposed at every point. We know what these people are capable of - and the last thing we need to is give our blessing and support for them getting away with yet more.

Even a broken clock like the OP is right once in a while, even if for stupid reasons.

And what is to be done about Assange? — Banno

Really? A misdirect? That's your response?

Yeah but you're naive enough to think that handing yet more power to a set of actors who have caused immesurable loss of life and acceleration of global misery will somehow save lives. In fact naive is far too nice a word. It is straight egregious stupidity. And if you think this is an issue that will only affect backyards other than yours, you haven't been paying attention to your own backyard, where you claim to be.

https://youtu.be/3RVJrr16NZo